ABSTRACT
Safety programs are prevention programs. And like all such programs, they can be notoriously difficult to maintain, and success hard to measure. The reason is simple: we’re asking people to do something that inhibits or inconveniences them in order to prevent something from happening that may never occur. A worker could potentially go on a site wearing nothing more than a tool belt and sustain nary a scratch throughout his or her entire career. Yet we require him to wear eye, head, ear, and foot protection as well as various and sundry restraint systems that slow him down or impede his movements all for the sake of preventing that one instance in ten thousand that could actually result in injury or death. In a very real sense, safety programs are an act of faith, because only on rare instances can anyone actually see the accident that was successfully prevented.
