Posts Tagged ‘green jobs’

New Cavalcade of Risk; other news briefs

Thursday, July 30th, 2009

Nancy Germond is hosting this week’s Cavalcade of Risk at her blog, Insurance Copywriter. She should get hazardous duty pay – she tells us that it is 113 degrees by noon on any given day in Phoenix – yikes. Nancy’s post covers topics as diverse as damaged guitars, dog health, and – of course – the health care debate. By the way, you can find more risk-related articles authored by Nancy at AllBusiness.
Other news notes
As we noted previously, Roberto Ceniceros has been attending the Disability Management Employer Coalition annual meeting and has been posting about the meeting on his blog. We found one item that he wrote about in Business Insurance of particular interest: his report that Harley Davidson is using functional assessments to reduce workers comp and disability claims among new hires and in its return-to-work programs. Hanover, Md.-based BTE Technologies Inc. provides the electronic functional assessment testing system and accompanying software and evaluates worksites to perform physical-demand analyses. The “…system evaluates attributes such as range of motion, dexterity, grip strength, lifting ability and tolerance of certain positions. Employees are measured by pushing against a column, lifting weights and other efforts matched to specific job requirements that are recorded electronically.” The company estimates savings of nearly $260,000 in workers comp claims costs by preventing new hire injuries alone, which doesn’t encompass the other benefits and savings from the disability and RTW components.
In Risk and Insurance, Peter Rousmaniere launches a three-part series on health issues facing veterans as they return to the workplace. His first post tells the story of one Sgt. Stephen Kinney of New Hampshire, ho was the victim of an IED explosion on the outskirts of Camp Anaconda in Iraq. Among injuries, Kinney sustained brain injuries and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) that left him unable to resume his prior job as mail carrier.
NIOSH Science Blog posts about safe and health green jobs and tells us that, with its partners, NIOSH has launched a Going Green: Safe and Healthy Jobs initiative. The note that as America moves towards energy efficiency and more environmentally-friendly practices, it is likely that there will be changes to traditional jobs and the creation of new kinds of occupations. The purpose of the initiative is to eliminate hazards in the green jobs through planning, organization, and engineering – a concept known at NIOSH as Prevention through Design (PtD).
Supporting Safer Healthcare posts that U.S. News & Word report has issued its 2009 list of best hospitals.
The Ohio Department of Insurance has a new web address – update your bookmarks accordingly: www.insurance.ohio.gov/ (Please note – we had previously said that it was the Ohio Bureau of Workers Comp that had a new web address but we were wrong – that stays the same: www.ohiobwc.com – sorry for any confusion!)