The Observance of Health and Safety Guidelines with PPE - Research Proposal Example

Risks in the workplace are much so emphasized in industries, whereby workers are exposed to such dangers as part of their everyday functionalities. It is precisely because of the nature of their jobs being so that these dangers are taken into consideration in a calculative manner to aid their administrations to minimize those risks. It is all about identifying risks and reducing those risks to levels that will fit existing working standards. As aforementioned, the labor force is laden with individuals who are, by the nature of their work, inevitably exposed to risks.

Steps are taken to alleviate such risks. This paper explores what available information says about the use of Personal Protective Equipment (PPE), its scope, the legal work that frames it, the policy implications in the public and the issues that govern it, with the objective of giving a comprehensive discussion of the literature regarding the PPE. The question of the theory behind the policy of public safety, as the concerns regarding the provision, management, usage and maintenance of PPE is a safety issue, is something that needs to be discussed.

This part of the paper aims to provide an explanation from a theoretical standpoint, as to why public safety and health is a concern for most governments and policy-making bodies, such as that of the United Kingdom. In Peter Dorman’s The Economics of Safety, Health, and Well-Being at Work: An Overview, he asserts that while issues of injury may be closer to that of health issues, they are also economic in nature as they stem from whatever economic activity there is in one’s society (Dorman, 2000).

In short, the issues of health and safety in one society are effects of whatever economic activity that society undergoes. For example, an accident regarding falling debris in one construction is brought about by the need to build infrastructure, which is an economic activity. This overlap of domains is something that Dorman seeks to elaborate on in his paper. If issues of safety and health are subsumed under economic activity does this not mean that the behavior of the agents of economic activity—that is, any human being— hold some explanation as for why regulations regarding safety and health in status quo are formulated in such a way? H .W.

Heinrich with his work, “Industrial Accident Prevention: a Scientific Approach”, can be considered as one of the most fundamental sources of discussion on health and safety. In essence, he asserts that it most cases, it is the unsafe acts of people that get them into accidents (Heinrich, 1959). The proposition is interesting because it asserts that, relatively, it is individuals’ unsafe acts (causing 88 percent of accidents) and not their unsafe working conditions (causing 10 percent of accidents) that cause accidents in the workplace.

   Another article by de Almeida discusses the theory of Heinrich as having the perception that events that precede an accident are “linear”, like a domino effect, possibly triggered by a person’s actions (de Almeida, 2006). Central to this adage is the idea that persons are possible agents of accidents and hence, regulating the behavior of individuals may be the key to ensuring the prevention of accidents in the workplace.  All of these thoughts are major contributions of the theoretical framework provided by Heinrich.