ABSTRACT
You are a health and safety communicator. Whether based on your motivation, the role you have in your organization, an assignment or a blend of these, you aim to improve the lives of others through messaging on health and safety issues. To do well, you have a model to follow and a range of know-feel-do strategies and approaches designed to assist with your success. Hopefully, this guide helps with your success. Throughout this guide, you have been introduced to several examples and recommendations from the field that help you use the model. The examples demonstrate ways in which communities and organizations, agencies and individuals, have had an impact. There is, in fact, no “conclusion” that says “The End.” This chapter is not like a movie that has an end; it is more like a beginning, or a new beginning, for you. Implementing health and safety communications is a process. The desired endpoint-increased health and safety-can always be better; our lives can always be improved. It’s like the goal line is continuously moving. Further, the effectiveness of your work can always improve. As you strive to make a difference with a health or safety issue, you have noticed a gap or a need, and you want to do something about it. You want to accomplish your goal and you want to see change. In this process, your aim is to change people’s minds. This is no easy task. People have worked for years and years on various health and safety issues, and change is slow. As you work on your issue, you must keep in mind that your task of changing others’ minds, through whatever processes and efforts you use, is a daunting one. Remember, throughout the process, that you have an aim, or a mission, and that is to make a difference in their lives. With this, you must have a strategy. You must be strategic and organized. To summarize, ten tips are offered in this chapter to help remind you about the importance of staying on track. This strategy is not a simple one, such that you will accomplish your goal with, for example, the implementation of a single approach. With your health and safety communications effort, you must be committed to working on the issue-the gaps-for the long haul. Your aim of changing minds, and hearts, must be viewed as a slow, strategic focus. You must be both patient and persistent. As cited in Chapter 12 on social media and various emerging technologies, as well as Chapter 6 that encompassed evaluation efforts, there’s a distinction that exists between your output and your throughput. All too often, your focus may be upon your throughput; after all it is these things and activities upon which you spend your time and energy. What is important is to review your results and modify and update your efforts as needed. Consider the following:
• You conducted two dozen workshops throughout the region on your area of specialization.
