As a 30-year veteran of the safety profession, Marc Gomez, assistant vice chancellor for facilities management and environmental health and safety at the University of California, Irvine (UCI), has given plenty of thought to the causes of injury. “We do follow-ups and look closely at the root causes. And we see the main cause of accidents is inattention and a lack of mindfulness about one’s circumstances and surroundings. Workplace safety is a state of mind.”
A Mindful Approach
He believes part of the problem is the barrage of incoming information from digital and nondigital sources. “It made sense to me that it we could get people to be more mindful, and in the moment it would reduce accidents.”
He evokes the image of an individual walking through the parking lot glued to the cell phone. A trip and fall keeps the worker off the job for weeks.
The idea of applying mindfulness to safety caught the attention of clinical psychologist Jessica Drew de Paz. She joined the EHS department about 9 years ago. “The reason I was hired demonstrates Marc’s outside-the-box thinking,” she says.
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Gomez had a staff of highly competent safety professionals, but he was looking for someone who could help the department find new and better ways to reach people. He hired Drew de Paz to oversee safety and health training.
She had always been interested in the concept of mindfulness. Learning that inattention was a top cause of safety accidents inspired Drew de Paz and Gomez to secure funding for research into this new and promising area of training. They are currently developing a mindfulness curriculum.
“I realized that we offer 60 safety training courses and none of them address this idea of staying in the moment,” says Drew de Paz. “To me it’s akin to physical exercise—you can be physically fit, but a trainer really shows you how. We need to be shown how to be mindful.”
In tomorrow’s Advisor, we’ll look into what UCI’s mindfulness-based safety training might look like–plus explore a safety training resource full of powerful PowerPoint presentations.
Show your employees how mindful you are about safety training—and how much you expect them to pay attention to working safely—by getting access to dozens of prepared safety training sessions with the extensive Workplace Safety Library at BLR’s TrainingToday.
Train Today with TrainingToday
BLR’s TrainingToday is a unique training resource for workplaces of all kinds. Unlike many training solutions available on the market today, TrainingToday courses are routinely reviewed and updated to reflect changes in federal regulations or best practices. Each training course is developed by BLR lawyers, industry experts, and instructional designers who have experience across a wealth of industries, topics, and compliance areas.
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