Safety Meetings are a critical part of ept Rehabilitation’s Healthy Workplace program. They create awareness and motivation of supervisors, managers and workers about ways to prevent injuries and to treat injuries early before they require medical intervention.

When an organization signs up for ept Rehabilitation’s Healthy Workplace program, one of the first things to happen is one or more Safety Meetings.

These meetings have multiple goals, depending on who attends:

• Explain how ept‘s Healthy Workplace services –Early Intervention Program (EIP), On-Site Ergonomic Evaluations and Job Placement Assessments work.
• Educate supervisors and other managers to identify workers’ reports and behaviors that can lead to injury.
• Educate staff workers to be proactive and report “first aid problems” to a supervisor before they become a medical problem.
• Educate managers and supervisors on how to screen each case to determine if it is first aid suited to EIP or a serious injury.
• Injury prevention through knowing how to identify symptoms and use the EIP for first aid.
• Insurance claims reduction and money saved through use of On-Site Ergonomic Evaluations and Job Placement Assessments.
• Help companies fulfill part of their OSHA safety training requirements.

Special Safety Meeting Topics

In addition to the basic ept Rehabilitation Healthy Workplace Safety Meeting agenda, each presentation is custom-tailored to meet the needs of your organization. Trained ept Rehabilitation staff members can cover a wide range of OSHA-required and/or company-specific topics, including:

• Back safety
• Ergonomics
• Electrical safety
• Emergency action and fire prevention
• Blood-borne pathogens
• Job hazard analysis
• Preventing falls
• Accident investigation
• Welding, cutting and brazing
• Hazard communication
• New employee safety orientation
• Hand and power tools
• Hearing conservation
• Safe chemical handling
• Compressed gas safety
• HAZWOPER: Awareness level
• Machine guarding
• Crane and sling safety
• Respiratory protection
• Many more, as needed

Safety Meeting Benefits

Experience has shown that safety meetings have a number of immediate and long-range benefits. Perhaps the most dramatic is the immediate increase in company morale as everyone works together to establish and maintain a Healthy Workplace. Workers learn that management cares about their health and safety, and management benefits by having motivated, trained workers who take responsibility for their own injury prevention.

• Increased productivity
• Injury prevention strategies in place
• Improved product quality
• Encouragement and ability to self-treat
• Increased employer management of first aid incidents
• Reduction of injuries, lost time, workers’ compensation claims and insurance experience modification (ex-mod) number
• Company commitment to Healthy Workplace program results in reduction of negative work attitudes

Many of these benefits are a direct result of one or more of the features of the entire Healthy Workplace suite of services mentioned above. But what the Safety Meeting does best is to get everyone in the organization involved in making the workplace truly safe and healthy.