Go Green for Safety
This time of year, it is traditional for friends and neighbors to share their favorite corned beef and cabbage recipes or let you know where they buy those green-frosted cupcakes. Of course, this is all part of the prep for St. Patrick’s Day celebrations. Many will wear green and go out “sham-rocking” on March 17.
What does that have to do with safety at your organization?
You’ll want to encourage your coworkers and their family members to have fun and be safe. That includes planning for a safe ride home from a party or night out. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration estimates the annual economic impact of alcohol-related crashes in the U.S. to be more than $57 billion, and St. Patrick’s Day is one of the most popular holidays for drinking.
Nearly 100 people were killed in DUI-alcohol fatal crashes on Texas roads in March 2022, according to the Texas Department of Transportation, and one-quarter of those fatalities occurred during a seven-day period around St. Patrick’s Day.
Use our free resources to boost your impairment safety-related education efforts:
- Poster to Display: Designated drivers are good-as-gold friends
- 12-Minute Training for Your Team: What happens when different drugs combine into a potentially volatile mix?
- Questions and Answers: Print a set of Safety Coach Cards, available in English and Spanish, mix them up and play a Jeopardy-style quiz game to create engagement at a team meeting or during a St. Patrick’s Day shindig
You can also get free resources from NHTSA to reinforce safe driving behaviors:
- Fact sheets
- Social media assets, including a playbook stocked with content you can use on your own channels
- Text for use on message boards
So go green! Maybe you’ll even help save a life by addressing these timely, impairment-related safety issues.
Turn Curiosity into Action
During National Drug and Alcohol Facts Week (March 18-24), we’d like to encourage you to explore our new Workforce Impairment Training. This one-of-a-kind course answers a number of questions and will help you take a proactive role in keeping your team safe. You’ll learn:
- The relationship between impairment and workplace safety
- Factors and situations that can cause impairment
- Common signs and symptoms of impairment
- What to do upon observing impairment in the workplace
- Cost and impact of employee impairment to a company’s bottom line
- What resources can help you recognize and address impairment at work
Realistic scenarios and practice activities help participants recognize many types of impairment, including impairment caused by drugs or alcohol, fatigue, over-the-counter medications or mental distress. Contact [email protected] to schedule training, offered virtually or in-person:
We’d also like to encourage you to explore these activities from the National Institute on Drug Abuse to create engagement in safety at your workplace. These activities are intended for use by a wide variety of individuals, including parents, caregivers and teachers:
- Create “My Why” videos that can be shared on social media channels
- Find strategies to cope with stress and support mental health
- Test everyone’s knowledge on what causes drug overdoses and how to use life-saving naloxone
Learn how to become a Respond Ready Workplace from the National Safety Council. Having naloxone at your workplace and training your employees to use it will give them the skills needed to save a life at work – or anywhere.
All of these ideas are intended to help your supervisors improve their ability to respond to safety and health concerns, promote safety behaviors and reduce costs resulting from incidents. That’s a safety trifecta!