Summary and Reflection
The speaker’s topics are focusing on occupational health and safety in general terms with various themes to focus on in the broad topic. Understanding the cause of a problem is the first step that will help prevent the occurrence of an injury or problem in the future. Pollution arising from smoke is hazardous to our bodies. Although the government has mandated and given authority to a body to ensure the citizens are safe, it is the responsibility and the duty of every individual at personal and home level to ensure their safety. Smooth co-existence in the society and at workplace requires satisfaction of the things we are doing. For maximum satisfaction, there is need to ensure the security in our environments. We are faced with various accidents at home and workplaces. Some of these accidents can be prevented once and for all.
Smoke has many effects on our bodies, therefore; it is harmful to smoke cigarettes. Preventing some problems at home will ensure a safe environment at our homes and away from home. People will not be visiting hospitals because of problems that they can prevent. When dealing with chemicals at home, people may consume these chemicals either directly or indirectly ending up affecting body functioning. To ensure that everybody is safe right from home will save not only the lives of children but also all ages. Safety affects us in various ways like accidents, injuries and causing hazards that can be physical. Training the public on how they can avoid these avoidable situations will assure the society a healthier living. The actions that will ensure the safety of individuals can be termed as preventive safety measures. Through training, the society is sensitized on safety precautions.
Safety Emanates from Home
As great scholars put it that charity begins at home, in health and safety, one must live in a safe place at his or her home. If the home is not safe to live, people are subjected to situations that affect their health. They will not keep safety at workplace too. For instance, cleanliness must start with someone right from home. This will allow individuals to keep themselves and others safe at the workplace. Water can cause serious injury to someone when it is poured on a slippery floor. The bathroom is very hazardous at home and workplaces. Some dangers that bathrooms put into the lives of human include causing injury in the event one falls on the slippery floor (Staff, 2008). The other hazard is that medications should never be stored near bathrooms to avoid making these medications wet. Proper lighting in these places and even in the medication storage device will avoid errors in taking the medicines.
Home is the basic social unit where different people who are related by blood or through adoption. Keeping home healthy and safe to live remains a priority to every individual. At home is where people are involved in many activities that are prone to injuries. These injuries can be prevented by undertaking precautions. Some of the main cause of these injuries at home are because of fire and pollution. These cause physical and psychological problems. Keeping home environment safe such that the hazard it would cause is not that adverse will improve and safe life. A safe and clean home is the definition of an environment that is free from germs and dangerous chemicals. Cleanliness is paramount for safety at home.
Some measures to ensure the security at home includes proper good lighting. When the bathrooms are not well lit, one can fall accidentally causing serious injuries to their bodies. There is a need to have enough lighting so that one can read medication instructions properly. With the modern technology that is all around in our lives, the electric heaters at our bathrooms can warm water to high temperatures that may make the skin burn. When workers learn the proper temperatures that they need to use hot water at for bathing, they will educate the society and help solve the safety hazard. Workers have the understanding that safety starts with an individual back at home and then it continues to be embraced at workplaces.
Heating as Safety Hazard: At home, electricity came the other day. People used wood and other sources of heat to cook, warm their bodies and homes. Understanding that safety starts at homes helps employees to efficiently and, most paramount, safely heating process at their homes and work. Heating whether at home or application at workplace involves cost, and there is a risk of fire. Therefore, understanding the safety tips when heating will help individual employees to manage utility advice and in the end heat their homes efficiently and safely.
Firewood Heating: Wood smoke is the remains of firewood because of incomplete combustion and causes air pollution. The harmful gasses in the smoke are detrimental to the body. Some particles constitute wood smoke known as particulate matter. Smoke contains carbon monoxide, which is very poisonous as in a closed environment, it reduces blood flow hence suffocation. Hydrocarbons present in the smoke injuries lungs making it very difficult to breathe. Effects of smoke include itchy eyes, headache, and congestion (Hall, 2007). These can be avoided by developing a program that would involve the community workers and the leadership of nurses who understand the adverse effects of smoke; they would help the society avoid infections that arise because of wood smoke. Smoke is intense when the wood being burnt is not dry enough. Implementing programs in the society that help avoid smoke in heating applications at home will keep the society from various diseases like bronchitis, cancer, and emphysema. Smoke adversely affects children and the aged that is over sixty-five years old. People with respiratory diseases are also affected by smoke.
Pollution is not something that everyone can fully associate to manufacturing plants but even the small actions that people undertake our homes contribute much towards pollution. The polluted air puts our lives into the danger of falling sick. If one of our friends or even a family member smokes cigarettes, those surrounding this person are in danger of acquiring diseases like lung cancer, syndrome, ear infections and sudden deaths of infants. At our homes, there is need to smoke far away from other people so that the smoke does not affect them either indirectly or directly. There are about four thousand chemicals found in cigarette smoke of which about two hundred and fifty cause cancer to the inhalers (Hall, 2007). At workplaces, smokers will be mindful of where they smoke so that they do not affect those around them. If someone has a loving heart for others, whenever an individual is smoking, one will always try to avoid smoking in public.
Extending Safety from Home to Workplaces
Satisfied employees perform better than employees who have problems with their employer, workmates, family problems and stressful jobs. If the home is a comfort to an employee, it means that this person is active and ready to perform. Good and enough sleep at home will ensure employees are active all day. The kind of practices people do at home are the same things they extend to workplaces. If a person has the knowledge that making the floor slippery is a risk and can cause injury, this will not allow a normal person to leave water on slippery floors for the safety of oneself and that of other people.
Several cases have been reported of fire outbreaks costing those affected many valuables. Having a smoke sense in our homes will alert the owner when smoke is sensed in the house for proper action before fire catches the whole building. Someone who has a smoke sensor at home will propose to the company management so that it can install these sensors in their building for safety (Harrison & Heywood, 2000). Such ideas would save the firm’s property from the fire because they can sense the smoke before the fire breaks. Other cases of whole families perishing in the fire have been reported too. If these people were educated on how to fight the fire, they would rescue others in the village. Due to the kind of lighting used in the majority of homes, fire can be evident more frequently at homes than in companies.
According to the current statistics in America, there are many cases of injuries reported resulting from burns. These cases extend and even cause death. The approximate number that is reported every year is about three thousand eight hundred injuries and over thirty deaths, which were reported to happen at homes. Educating the public on how to prevent these incidences in the future will bring safety at home. With these precautions, the same people would extend the safety to the workplace.
Precautionary Actions to Prevent Injuries
Research has found that most of these accidents that occur to affect the health of others is because of ignorance, negligence and lack of knowledge on handling equipment that is the core causes. Various methods that can be applied to our homes to prevent burns can be implemented at enterprises so that injuries do not occur and if they happen to occur the cases reported to be minimal are discussed. Cases of skin burns reported every year in America result from hot showers and cooking process accidents.
When people bathe with over heated water in the showers, it affects the body cells by killing them hence putting the body into a risk of infection and injuries. In the bathrooms, there is a need to know the temperatures of the water that we use to bathe. It is not healthy to bath water that is over 120 degrees centigrade so that we do not burn our skins. Staff (2008) recommends that hot water needs to be lowered to less than this so that people do not burn the skin. It is advisable to turn on both hot and cold showers so that the mixing can allow the water to cool down to the advisable temperatures by health experts.
After bathing, the soap and water that is poured in out bathrooms put our lives at the risk of falling. Training ourselves at home to do mobbing and clean the bathroom allows us to reduce the risk of falling. This behavior becomes a habit in someone’s life hence it is always extended from home to our workplaces. Such a precaution will help save employees from the danger of falling on slippery grounds. The older people are the currently reported to face these injuries because they are old enough not to remember to mob water after bathing. There is a need to have individuals who can help the aged do this work so as to reduce the cases reported emanating from falls.
Comparison and Contrast
In the real world, at workplaces, there are designated places where cigarettes smokers are allowed to do smoking not very place. Publicizing the hazard effects of smoke has caused a shift in the smoke that people inhale. The building of kitchen where wood heating is used at home has proper ventilation and a chimney that will not allow smoke to accumulate in the house. There is a kitchen in the modern firms hence with the proposal from the workforce the kind of equipment used here is not causing much smoke emission into the air which can affect other employees.
Healthy eating starts at home and prevents infections from consuming unhealthy foods. When you eat well at homes will help individuals to have healthy bodies hence they work comfortably. This information about diet is shared among different employees in their interactions at work. They go and feed the same meals making themselves and their families healthier and free from diseases associated with malnutrition. Nutrition mostly is at home. According to Kris-Etherton et al., (2014), the kind of diet that people eat determines if they will be infected with diseases of the heart, neoplasm or malignant. These diseases are the leading causes of deaths in the United States. The healthcare providers need to be equipped with the right knowledge so that they educate the public on proper diets that are free of causing these infections.
Training people on programs can help mitigate and stop the progression of these infections at home because they will do physical activities and eat proper diets that are free from putting life into the risk of infection. Human resource is all about personnel and their interactions at the workplace. With proper skills, employees help one another to lead healthier living. Obese people are also neglected at work thus when they leave work; they will try to do activities that reduce obese and make them healthier (Kris-Etherton et al., 2014). Therefore, professionalism is needed to ensure safety for all employees. Interactions will change the way people live and lead a better life through coping behavior of the people one interacts with at work.
An organization that treats its employees well makes them perform better in their duties. They feel comfort in their workplace hence committing themselves to their duties. All individuals highly value safety from any injury whether at work or home. Human Resource management ensures the welfare of employees is well catered for so that they can perform better in their roles. It mainly focusses on the wellbeing of employees to an enterprise of which safety is paramount. Safety from any danger, therefore, improves performance at work.
References
Hall, J. R. (2007). Home fires involving heating equipment. National Fire Protection Association.
Harrison, L., & Heywood, F. (2000). Health begins at home: The housing health interface for older people. Reviews on environmental health, 15(1-2), 149-168.
Kris-Etherton, P., Akabas, S., Bales, C., Bistrian, B., Braun, L., Edwards, M. & Pratt, C. (2014). The need to advance nutrition education in the training of health care professionals and recommended research to evaluate implementation and effectiveness. The American journal of clinical nutrition, 99(5), 1153S-1166S.
Staff, C. D. C. (2008). Preventing Falls: How to Develop community-based fall prevention programs for older adults. National Center for Injury Prevention and Control, Atlanta, GA.
