The task of the Preventionist is to influence his company in such a way that it makes him more aware, this is a complex process that starts with the position that the professional has won before the managers of the company and at the same time before the other organs of power with a different language for each segment.
What is the profile of the preventionist?
In a new profession with a rather multidisciplinary activity, answering this question is not easy. But we can venture at least the following:
In order to develop its management, the Preventionist requires:
1) Technical knowledge of the process in which you are involved: what physical, chemical, biological, psychosocial, ergonometric risks are present in your activity, emergency risks and characteristics of your workplace, other information required from your expertise such as: Industrial hygiene, evaluations, measurements, data interpretation, etc. Work safety standards applied to your activity, causes of accidents, accident investigation, training programs, statistics, etc. Work biomechanical evaluations, familiarize yourself with occupational medicine diagnoses.
2) A solid and updated legal training that allows you to understand the meaning of the Labor Safety Law related to your country, apply it to the training of workers reflected in the preparation of documents such as induction talks, right to know talks, safe work procedures, Internal Regulations of Order, Hygiene and Safety, advise your company regarding the basic sanitary conditions of your workplace, exposure to toxic agents, the obligations imposed by law on the employer and your practical application, the operations of the Joint Security Committees, etc.
3) And finally, the ability to make your delivered message understood, valued, accepted, and cause the necessary attitude changes in managers, supervisors, and workers. The ability to tune into the entire company in such a way that the professional becomes the catalyst for changes within the company in which it operates.
The first two characteristics do not pose such a deep challenge because both respond to a matter of knowledge, bad for bad, the current system allows knowledge to circulate freely on the fast roads of cyberspace. There are pages, not many, but they do exist, from where you can get complete security information.
For example:
www.mtas.es/inhst
www.prevention-world.com
www.prevencionintegral.com
But what happens when that knowledge must be transmitted to the aforementioned levels of the company: managers, supervisors, workers?
A reality is that the professional weight of the Preventionist has not yet managed to earn the credit he deserves, this may be due, among other things, to the same multidisciplinary characteristic that gives the prevention professional a veneer of everything, without delving into many contents. We can imagine a technical discussion between a preventionist and; a chemist, a lawyer, a builder, a business manager, an architect, a doctor, etc. In many cases, the reality is that the professional of the specialty will prevail or even when he is not correct, it will diminish the validity of the arguments of the Preventionist.
It does not seem logical then that the work of the Preventionist is to continue on the path of increasing his technical knowledge to enhance the conflict to the level that makes it favorable to his vision. For example, the Preventionist is not going to impose the constructive method to define how the excavation will be done, nor is he going to define what chemical is going to be used to make such a substance more basic or more acidic, anyway.
On the other hand, the Preventionist has the task of ensuring that the operational decisions made by the company are considering the value of risk prevention, thus, from the most complex to the simplest decisions, they will be under the same vision. For this it will be necessary for the Preventionist to be able to influence the work atmosphere that exists in the company and manage to make an issue that regularly did not exist or did not live in the organization become an increasingly important issue.
We should recognize today, that the bulk of the development of the preventive issue is in the Security Climate that exists within the company and that defines the security response of the Executives, of the peers and finally of the individual workers, which finally They are the people who must decide whether to follow safe attitudes and comply with company procedures or not.
Considering the above, it seems that the Preventionist must be a person with a high technical knowledge of his specialty, with a solid training in the legal aspects that surrounds his work and, above all, with Assertiveness and Social Ability to present his ideas persuasively and suggestive so that these are understood and assimilated by the various levels of the company.
How to pretend to be the manager of changes within the company without considering that your own personality is capable of projecting the image of a professional who knows what he says and knows how he says it.
For this reason it is easier to look for culprits. After the accident, you finally have all the information about the activity that had been undertaken, vital information that was missing before making a good decision, there is no doubt "Everyone knows that the cart was bad, after his axis has been broken »or what is the same" After the war, they are all generals ". The task of the Preventionist is to influence his company in such a way that it makes him more aware, this is a complex process that starts from the position that the professional has won before the managers of the company and at the same time before the other organs of power with a different language for each segment.
Because the communication says, Humberto Maturana: it does not have to do with the message that is delivered, but with how the receiver has received this message and what changes have been generated in his behavior?
It is not a short-term task, in order to generate this climate of security, it is necessary that, firstly, the company “talks” about risk prevention, in the casino, at the meeting, in the lockers, on the way there or back, in the usual and informal conversation, between managers, between supervisors and between workers.
Secondly, it is necessary that these same characters act accordingly, take care of "setting a good example", the works are more valuable than words, despite the fact that language generates reality, this reality lives in acts and each person by himself chooses the acts that he will do or will not do.
As you will see, both measures "speaking" and "setting a good example" do not constitute a monetary investment for a company, they correspond to the area of its soft factors, but paradoxically these cultural factors are precisely the most difficult to change because they imply an organizational change, a change that ultimately must be orchestrated by a professional who must be up to these matters.
The tools that make risk prevention a discipline with such a solid scientific base that its arguments are not debatable will be lacking, in fact it is very likely that this never exists, after all care and self-care are valuable concepts as they are responsibility, honesty or solidarity, people are willing to make these changes as their consciousness as a human being also becomes more developed.
