>> The National Safety Stand- Down is born out of the
construction falls prevention campaign. And the campaign came
to be because among the goals for the second decade of the
National Occupational Research Agenda, NORA, there were 15
goals related to construction safety and health. The first
goal has to do with preventing falls in the workplace, falls in
construction, in particular. And among the intermediate goals,
there is an issue related to having a national campaign. With
OSHA being the main face of the campaign, the main face of the
stand-down, with a lot of supporting effort by NIOSH and
CPWR. The campaign gets relaunched every spring. The
stand-down happens every spring. And each year we have seen that
more and more people are engaged.
>> Fundamentally, the face program in Washington is a
surveillance program for work- related fatalities. And our
association with NIOSH is that the idea for the FACE program
started at NIOSH. And then they had the idea to get states
involved. And, hence, we became a stated-based FACE program.
>> Here in Oregon, we’ve viewed the NIOSH funding for our
expanded occupational health surveillance as just a precious
resource. And this includes opportunities to participate in
events like the stand-down. So we first got involved in really,
small ways when it kicked off, I believe, back in 2014. We were
just invited by NIOSH to support the events. And we had some
field studies and construction studies and safety and Toolbox
Talks, and we began by just ordering a bunch of hardhat
stickers and posters and flyers and giving them to our research
partners and also to our other construction government Oregon
OSHA partners around the state as we worked on that specific
field study.
>> One thing that’s really important in establishing a
safety stand-down campaign is creating a visual identity for
your campaign. You can create a state-specific visual identity
that you can use in emails, on your websites, safety resources
and other communications that when people see it, employers
see it, workers see it, they know that it’s about the safety
stand-down campaign.
>> The Oregon FACE program has partnered with the main players
in the stand-down here in Oregon, including Oregon OSHA,
the AGC chapter, the Associated General Contractors, Safe-Build
Alliance, and others, to present, not just present the
program, but also promote in advance. One year we had a bus
ad on the public transit system here that promoted it. So that
traveled all over the city. We’ve put notices and updates on
our website. We’ve handed out stickers and flyers, and we’ve
blogged about it.
>> In Massachusetts, over the years, we’ve been able to have
the digital billboards across the state along, I think there
is now nine of them, along the major highways, and have the
national campaign poster on these digital billboards. And we
were able to swap out the OSHA 1-800 number and use a local
number to try to get people to, you know, to entice people to
kind of call in and get more information about the campaigns.
In the same poster on the billboards, we were able to get
on the public transportation system. So in Boston the subways
and then throughout Massachusetts, some of the
regional transits or the busses had campaign posters as well.
>> Some of the things that we did was that I’ve sent letters
of invitation to participate, along with stickers and
pamphlets, and a link to the website telling them how they
can participate, to five different unions. We’ve teamed
up with OSHA to have seven billboards across the state of
Kentucky that promote the stand- down for falls campaign. I went
on TV and radio here locally to help promote it and to encourage
employers to participate.
>> In recent years, we definitely have utilized social
media to get the word out about the safety stand-down campaign.
We produced a 30-second video and that video is now on YouTube
and on Twitter and it has a lot of exposure. And what it’s meant
to do is draw employers to our website, so they can take
advantage of the resources that we have for them to help prevent falls.
>> You know one important thing about sharing and disseminating
safety information and prevention training is making
sure that we are sensitive to language and culture barriers or
potential barriers.
>> We do get a lot of buzz online when we tweet in Spanish.
People just start liking it or retweeting. We start getting so
many more followers right at that moment. Particular topics
just catch onto the right audiences and I was so excited
when I didn’t do anything and I got retweeted so many times!
>> For people in other states who maybe don’t have a NIOSH
grant to conduct occupational health surveillance or to
investigate occupational fatalities and study and prevent
them, and you’ve got an interest to try to get involved and
participate in the stand-down to try to prevent construction
falls, I encourage you to reach out to states that do have NIOSH
funding and ask about their experiences and what’s worked
for them and what hasn’t worked for them. It doesn’t take a lot
to do something. And I think working together with partners
in the state, we are fortunate here in Oregon for a very
collaborative environment with government, universities,
workers’ comp insurers, the state government and
professional trade associations, to have a fertile environment to
do things together. But with the support of NIOSH and NIOSH
resources, I think we have the potential to make a much bigger
impact than if we didn’t have NIOSH and other federal agencies
supporting this effort.
>> The campaign is important, I think, to NIOSH in a couple of
different ways. First, those of us from the NIOSH side work
very, very hard to make certain that science was used in
developing the campaign, and again, the stand-down rests on
the rails of the campaign. So there’s a lot of research that
NIOSH has conducted in falls. But we also use communication
science in developing the actual campaign messages and the other
component parts of the campaign. I think that’s important because
it shows that NIOSH has been involved in a safety and health
education effort that rests on research that we’ve conducted or
that we’ve sponsored and that we’ve used communication science
to be able to organize. And that we are using dissemination
science in order to get the message out. We still have
evaluation work ahead of us to see how effective the campaign
has been over time, but we know that many people are using the
campaign materials, talking about the campaign, using print
and social media to continue to carry the message forward. So
that is personally gratifying, but I think it also shows that
our investments in these areas at NIOSH have continued to be
important.
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