By Chad Engle, Loss Prevention and Safety Manager
The third responsibility and duty of a safety committee, per NIRMA’s Safety Committee Resource Handbook, is training. The safety committee is not necessarily responsible for providing the actual training, but the committee is tasked with developing a training schedule and topics and presenting this to management. Generally, the safety committee works on a county or agency-wide training schedule and then presents it to the board for approval. Some NIRMA members have a distinct safety committee for a specific type of county operations, such as a highway department or sheriff’s office. Those committees would simply present the training schedule to whomever directs their department.
Topics for training should be easy to identify using your quarterly incident report. This report outlines the losses your county or agency has incurred in the three months prior. After investigating why and how those incidents occurred, tailor your training to address these causes. If you are fortunate enough to not have experienced any losses in the recent past, I would recommend you focus your training on preventing car crashes, slip/trip and fall and sprains/strains. These three causes of loss are consistently the most common among NIRMA members. You cannot go wrong focusing on these causes.
There are many options for loss prevention and safety training. NIRMA offers in-person training provided by any of our loss prevention and safety specialists. In addition, NIRMA offers online training resources via our Online University, the Energized Approach, as well as Streaming Videos on Demand. All these options can be found by clicking on Training under the Resources tab at https://nirma.info. Consider reaching out to local subject matter experts as well. Local fire departments and utility companies offer training as well. NIRMA members are also eligible for membership in the Nebraska Safety Council at no cost.
Our training calendars are filling up quickly. If you are planning to utilize NIRMA for in-person training, I recommend that you reach out sooner rather than later. As always, I can be reached at: chad@nirma.info or 1.800.642.6671.
