We safety professionals will often get inundated with lots of useful and practical information about safety and safety-related issues, topics, regulations and legislation. And often, we get this information passively, through trade magazines or journals or from other means that don’t involve direct conversation or engagement. And when it is passive, there is often no feedback by those of us woo receive the information, so often those who are sending or distributing the information don’t really know if what they are sending is getting read, or if it’s even the right message that is being understood, nor how much resistance there might be to a particular topic.

[Image courtesy of Flickr user Lindsey Turner via a Creative Commons license]

[Image courtesy of Flickr user Lindsey Turner via a Creative Commons license]

Once in a while, it is nice when we passive readers and informational sponges are given a chance to provide our opinions in one of those periodic polls or surveys that are conducted. And here, we’d like to take this opportunity to review an unscientific online poll of readers/subscribers to OHS Canada magazine, the results of which were released in a recent issue of the trade magazine and covered several different safety topics.

While I share what OHS Canada magazine revealed, I want you to have your own opinion and thoughts, and feel free to share them here in my comments section. Do you agree with these results? Is there a topic that is very important to you personally that you wish there was more attention paid to it, or that the survey results seemed to disagree with your own take? And most importantly, what are your biggest safety concerns that were not covered in this survey?

6 Questions

In a recent issue of OHS Canada magazine, results were posted for six different questions involving six different topics, with answers provided online by readers and subscribers. The topics ranged from the oil and gas industry to workplace violence to sedentary work to harassment. The numbers of responses varied from a low of 241 to a high of 1,095. “Yes” was the favored response in five of the questions, “No” once, and “Not sure/don’t know”received more than 20 percent of the vote on two occasions.

[Image courtesy of Flickr user Quinn Dombrowski via a Creative Commons license]

[Image courtesy of Flickr user Quinn Dombrowski via a Creative Commons license]

The Answers

The most lopsided poll question was, “Can workplace injury shorten lifespan?” While a conjectural question in many respects, safety officers seemed to be most definite on this one: 96 percent of the more than 700 respondents said yes, there was a correlation between workers getting injured on the job and their lifespan. Only 2 percent of people didn’t think there was a direct link.

A very close second was the question, “Should Canada mandate the full disclosure of chemicals used in hydraulic fracking?” A full 95 percent of the nearly 1,100 responses were “Yes,” while just 3 percent were “no.”

The most  contentious question dealt with hazardous materials, asking, “Is your firm ready for the Globally Harmonized System which will be fully implemented in Canada by 2018?” Forty percent of respondents said “Yes,” their firm was ready, 39 percent said “no,” and 21 percent (interestingly) said they weren’t sure.

The one question to which “no” was the prevailing choice was, “Are hospitals doing enough to protect healthcare workers  from workplace violence?” While only 241 people responded to this question, 63 percent of them said that hospitals were not doing enough, while 14 percent said they were. Twenty-three percent were not sure.

Anong the oher questions, 67 percent of respondents stated that sexual harassment should be considered an occupational health and safety issue under the law, and 58 percent said they would use pedaling device under their workstation to improve activity in an otherwise sedentary job.

You can visit www.ohscanada.com to learn more about the poll results and even participate in the latest poll.