Culturally, We Lack A Mindset For Safety. -DAWN Science; November 15, 2008

November 15, 2008

Culturally, We Lack A Mindset For Safety.

Tahseen Hassan is a senior trainer and consultant working for Occupational Safety & Loss Prevention International (OSALP). He has been working in the field of quality, health, safety and environment in and outside Pakistan for the last 13 years. Sci-tech World talks to him about the various aspects of health, safety and environment (HSE) in Pakistan.

Q Keeping in perspective the fire incidents that keep happening in Pakistan, what is the most common factor that leads to these disasters?

A Commitment, leadership and accountability of the top management are key factors in preventing HSE disasters at the workplace. If the top management is not convinced, unaware of the benefit of having HSE systems in place or are not trained, disasters will keep on happening.

Leaders have many priorities, including revenues and profits, employees issues, marketing and legal issues, etc. Due to these, HSE sometimes tends to be ignored. They need to be aware of the fact that their organisation maybe in line for a big disaster if HSE is ignored and eventually the losses that may occur will be much more than what would have been spent on prevention.

Q You have conducted trainings and audits at various private and government organisations in Pakistan. How do you evaluate the fire safety and awareness capability of these sectors?

A Fire prevention and mitigation are two separate control measures. The main focus should be to prevent a fire from starting in the first place through proactive action. Trainings of employees, making employees aware of the preventive measures to stop an incident and carrying out risk assessments are part of it. Organisations lack a high degree of control in these preventive measures.

Fire mitigation is all what you do once the fire starts. Fire fighting equipment, emergency evacuation and fire crew all come under this. Multinational organisations, as compared to government organisations, both here and abroad, have a reasonably good control on fire fighting systems. But even abroad we have seen that though the equipment was present, its proper usage was not known to the workers. Even the best fire fighting equipment cannot prevent fire from starting. The approach has to be proactive prevention, rather than fighting fires

Q We have seen good services such as Rescue 1122 coming up and some improvement in fire safety. What more needs to be done at the governmental level to achieve the minimum desirable level of fire safety nationwide?

A Culturally, we lack a mindset for safety. We need to get the HSE in the school curriculum that would make a big difference for our generations to come. Our children need to be trained on the importance of health and safety.

Just imagine children all over Pakistan learning the very basic HSE aspects and then trying to implement it at home. This would bring about a cultural change. We will see youngsters teaching their parents about things the parents did not learn even after becoming educated. This will have a substantial long-term impact.

Besides this, media campaigns and mandatory fire training and safety days at all organisations would also serve as good measures.

Q How do you evaluate the local scenario in terms of the choice of suppliers for fire safety equipment, availability of equipment and the price.

A There are good institutions in Pakistan that are supplying fire safety equipment. Though the price of some of these advance firefighting equipment might be very high, the profit and the revenue lost from a fire incident is much higher.

Again, the real spirit lies in preventing the fire in the first place. You can have the best first aid kit in the house to treat a childs burns but the damage has been done already. In fact the idea is to train and put preventive measures so that the child does not get burnt in the first place.

The focus and investment, thus, needs to be on fire prevention and not just firefighting. To promote a fire-safe culture, the government should consider encouraging imports of fire safety equipment by changing the duties and taxes structure. U.A

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