Sustainability & Risk/ Health & Safety / Background Data

Defining the Background Data Required for Health & Safety

In order to electronically track and analyze your site's environmental health and safety issues, you must first define the practices and standards that your site uses to monitor and classify Health & Safety events. With this detailed information defined, safety managers will be able to reference it when entering and tracking specific incidents at your site.

The Background Data process provides several tables for defining your practices. A facility manager, or other staff versed in the health and safety policies and the practices at your site, should carefully complete these tables. You may need to research certain details of your practices, such as the specific personal protective equipment, training requirements, accident responses, and so forth used at your site. Taking the time to carefully and completely define your conventions will enable you to better track health and safety issues.

A typical example is the Library feature. If you define as part of background data a system of library folders, document categories and document types, this framework will be available to safety managers when they check in a document to the library database.

Enter the following background data:

Background Data Category	Example
Work Categories	Lab technician, welder, painter, chemical mixer.
Personal Protective Equipment (PPE)	Gloves, face shields, hard hats, clean room suits.
Training	For specific chemicals and substances, enter the required course definitions, training categories, and training programs.
Medical Monitoring	Nature of monitoring, recurrence need, description, etc.
Incidents	Incident types, corrective actions, injury areas, injury categories, root causes.
Work Restrictions	Types and descriptions (no lifting, avoid particular chemical.)
Work Roles by Location	The safety officers in your company and the sites and buildings they oversee.
Application Parameters	E-mail notifications, report time frames.
Document Library Tables	Folder names, categories, types.
Problem Types	Categories (problem types) for generating service requests for health and safety items.