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>> I'm Christine Branche.
I'm the Principal Associate Director of NIOSH.
And I am also the Director of our Office
of Construction Safety and Health.
I'd like to share about the construction falls
prevention campaign.
That's an activity in which NIOSH has been heavily engaged
and the main architect of this activity,
but it came to fruition based on really the impetus
of the NORA Construction Sector Council.
It was one of the goals in the second decade of NORA.
And when we were trying
to determine what two areas we were going
to principally focus on, we had 15 different goals
and then trying to narrow our focus onto two main activities
for the Sector Council,
the falls prevention campaign was one
on which there was quite a bit of encouragement.
And so we worked really --
quite closely with the National Construction Center.
NIOSH funds an entity to be the National Construction Center
and that's CPWR, The Center
for Construction Research and Training.
So there was a workgroup formed
within our Sector Council to focus on this.
We looked at data.
We looked at existing campaigns because I was pretty committed
that if we were going to do this,
if designing a new campaign was going to be our endeavor,
it had to be infused and undergirded by science.
It couldn't be one of these gee-whiz bang isn't this great,
something sounds wonderful.
No. We wanted it all based on science.
And we were finding that there were no campaigns that existed
that really had evaluation to show
that it really made a difference.
And because we didn't find anything
that really fit the bill,
we decided it was time to design one.
We did enter into a tripartite relationship, NIOSH with OSHA,
which is a natural relationship as we all know
but also the Sector Council and specifically CPWR,
which they are -- they have a membership role
in our Sector Council but for them
as the National Construction Center and a lot of the work
that they did and having engaged the social marketing expert
was important.
This has been a very successful endeavor.
Large, medium-size, and as we're able to drive this message --
always an attempt to drive the message to the small,
residential construction contractor.
They have completely embraced it.
We've selected a week.
I think one year we toyed with the idea of two weeks,
but one week seems to be the right pace.
One week, at some point during that week,
we are encouraging construction activities, regardless of type
of construction, regardless of where in the United States
that some time during that week that, with their staff,
they stop work for some period of time
and focus on fall prevention.
And we give them a whole slate of activities
in which they can participate, whether it's, you know,
re-instructing workers about training them about how
to properly don equipment, what to do in an emergency.
We give them a whole list of things.
But we've engaged social media.
We've written -- used the CDCs morbidity
and mortality weekly report to try to drive this message
in an announcement each year.
Every single thing we can possibly do
to get the message out, we've tried to deploy.
Over and over again, these employers are saying
that their workers are talking about how,
by virtue of their management showing that they're concerned
about fall prevention, they feel
as if there's a better connection.
They feel as if their employers are walking the talk.
But I think the one message that I think warms my heart more
than anything else -- this one individual had one employee
and he did a stand down and I was like perfect.
That's exactly what we want to hear, that someone
who has just one employee or a handful
of employees would take the time to focus
on fall prevention regardless of the size of their project.