Tuesday, December 2, 2014

Safety Speaks: Dave Walline & Prevention Through Design

Safety Speaks is a podcast about the latest and greatest in occupational safety, covering contemporary issues in the world of OSH and providing insight from industry leaders.

Our guest for this episode is Dave Walline. He is president of Walline Consulting in Port St. Lucie, FL, and chair of ASSE’s Risk Assessment Committee. He is also the author of Prevention Through Design: Proven Solutions From the Field, a feature article in the November 2014 issue of ASSE's Professional Safety journal

If you heard our last podcast you already know the pitch for Prevention Through Design (PTD). In short, it’s designing safety elements into projects preemptively, rather than trying to address them reactively. It is a fairly straightforward concept to grasp, but execution in the real world is a completely different story.

Walline says OSH professionals need to be prepared to sell the concept of PTD to their management to have any hope of implementing it in a workplace. For that to happen, safety professionals need to  start redefining their roles, and eventually, in some ways, start redefining their profession.

You can listen here.