OBJECTIVES Education on occupational health and safety (OHS) is not a compulsory part of the curriculum of general secondary schools (GSSs) in many countries. Adolescence is a formative period. Mainstreaming education in OHS into GSSs is necessary in order to initiate in students a risk prevention culture. We explored the feasibility of using a photo competition (PC) concerning health protectio...

The Workers’ Compensation and Rehabilitation Commission (the WCRC) supports the concept of establishing consistency in the definition of terms such as “employer”, “employee”, ”workplace” and “work-related injury/illness and fatalities” relevant to both workers’ compensation and Occupational Health and Safety (OHS). However, the Productivity Commission should be aware that particularly in relati...

Prevention through Design (PtD) research is central to the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health's (NIOSH) national PtD initiative. Research is needed to support PtD efforts in all of the other three functional areas (Practice, Policy, and Education) and within all eight industry sectors. The PtD concept is new to many industry sectors. An understanding of how the PtD concept ca...

The aims of the present work were: to calculate lifting energy consumption (LEC) in work activities designed to have a growing lifting index (LI) by means of revised NIOSH lifting equation; to evaluate the relationship between LEC and forces at the L5-S1 joint. The kinematic and kinetic data of 20 workers were recorded during the execution of lifting tasks in three conditions. We computed kinet...

Integration of workplace employee health promotion (HP) and occupational health and safety (OHS) work into organizational quality improvement systems is suggested as a way to strengthen HP and OHS activities in an organization. The aim of this article was to study what consequences integration of HP, OHS and a quality improvement system called kaizen has on the frequency and type of HP and OHS ...

The management of occupational health and safety (OHS) including safety culture interventions is comprised of complex problems that are often hard to scope and define. Due to the dynamic nature and complexity of OHS management, the concept of system dynamics (SD) is used to analyze accident prevention. In this paper, a system dynamics group model building (GMB) approach is used to create a caus...

Using the results of psychophysical and biomechanical experiments, NIOSH (National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health) Recommended Weight Limit (RWL), the Lifting Index (LI), the form of the asymmetry multiplier, and the criterion for compression force were investigated. Analysis of the results indicated a significant difference between the NIOSH RWL and the reported Maximum Acceptabl...

To meet state and OSHA requirements for dealing with and reporting workplace violence, a growing number of hospitals, the author reports, are turning to baseline workplace violence assessments which survey employees in different roles, combined with a threat analysis and an analysis of existing controls and historical incidents that can be reviewed and tracked over time to show improvement or d...

This commentary responds to the recent critique by Weinstock and Slatin [1] of our systematic review on the effectiveness of occupational safety and health (OSH) training conducted jointly by the Institute for Work & Health (IWH) in Canada and the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) in the United States [2, 3]. We address misunderstandings of our perspectives on traini...