WORK PLACE SAFETY

Work Place Safety

Work Place Safety

Task One: Case Scenario

Harry owns a Building which is currently being renovated and converted into a leisure complex by a company called Buildings & Co. During the renovation all boards about onsite dangers have been put in place.

One evening Russell attempts to climb over the high wall surrounding the building in order to have a look around the site. In doing so, he tears his jacket and cuts his arm on a rusty barbed-wire fence laid around the top of the wall.

On the day following Russell's injury, Kylie, a local authority buildings inspector, visits the site to inspect Buildings & Co's work. She is injured by a tile which falls from the roof of the building.

The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) have a legal mandate for the protection of workers. This was evident in 1997, when OSHA published a draft TB standard in the Federal Register. After the publication of the draft standard, a period for public comment followed after which continued a series of hearings for testimony? Detailed comments were submitted from a CDC committee that included staff members of NIOSH, the Hospital Infections Program, and the Division of Tuberculosis Elimination. Many other professional organizations were also included. (Aggour, 1991) Similar was the reopening of the docket for further public comment in July 1999 by The Occupational Safety and Health Administration. It is an agency-wide enforcement policy for protecting exposed workers in both the private and federal sectors.

The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) Health Standard Promulgation

The Occupational Safety and Health Administration is solely responsible for protecting the health of workers exposed to TB as a result of their job, despite the responsibility of the U.S. Public Health Service to address the problem of tuberculosis in the general U.S. population.

OSHA has preliminarily concluded on the basis of a review of the available data that workers in hospitals, nursing homes, hospices, correctional facilities, homeless shelters, and certain other work settings are at significant risk of incurring Tuberculosis infection while performing certain procedures or attending their patients and clients, potentially involving exposure to TB.

The promulgation of a health standard was proposed by The Occupational Safety and Health Administration under section 6(b) of the Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1970, 29 U.S.C. 655. This standard was supposed to control occupational exposure to tuberculosis (TB). The health standard proposed by The Occupational Safety and Health Administration was published on October 17, 1997.

To reduce this occupational risk, the OSHA proposed standard requires employers to protect employees who are exposed to TB by means of control measures and infection prevention. This has demonstrated to being highly effective in reducing or eliminating job related TB infections. The measures include:

The use of respirators during the performance of certain high hazard procedures on infectious individuals,

Procedures carried out in order to identify and treat TB infection at the early stages, (Aggour, 1991)

Isolation of individuals having infectious TB in rooms that have been designed to protect those who are in ...