We've just released the February issue of The Monthly SUN.

Topics covered in this issue:

• Company Corner? - Safety Unlimited Selected as an OSHA Outreach Training Program Provider
• Regulatory Review - Workplace Injury and Illness Summaries
• Did You Know? - NIOSH Pocket Guide to Chemical Hazards
• Support Sanctuary - Advance Purchases

The Monthly SUN

Some of our customers may not be aware of the many advantages they will gain by doing an Advance Purchase with Safety Unlimited. Here are just a few:

The first, and most obvious, is the tremendous savings. In fact, the more courses you buy, the more you will save, up to 75% off the actual price.

Advance Purchase courses also have no expiration dates. This means that you do not have to take the courses right after you purchase them, like you do with other courses. You can take the courses whenever you need to and never have to worry if they will expire.

Along the same lines, the courses you purchase will automatically receive free upgrades. So if a course is updated because a large amount of time has passed from when you first purchased the course to when you take it, you will still be able to take the latest version of the training you signed up for.

Finally, your Advance Purchase courses allow for incomplete training substitutions. This means that if a student does not complete their training, they can be removed from the course and replaced with someone else.

For more benefits – and further information on Advance Purchases– please go to our webpage on Advance Purchase and Volume Pricing.

Support Sanctuary Advance Purchases, Volume pricing, Course savings

Did you know that the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) offers a pocket guide to chemical hazards? If you have a chemical spill at your workplace, this guide allows you to learn about the hazards of that chemical.

In particular, the guide provides NIOSH recommended exposure limits (REL), OSHA permissible exposure limits (PEL), immediately dangerous to life and health (IDLH) values, measurement methods, personal protection and sanitation recommendations, respiratory selection recommendations, exposure routes, symptoms, target organs, first aid information, and much, much more. The guide, in effect, provides Material Safety Data Sheet (MSDS) information for all chemicals tested by NIOSH.

The ability to identify a chemical's hazards quickly helps you determine the risks of exposure and how to clean up a spill (or whether you should tackle it yourself at all).

You can search the guide online, using a variety of search criteria, to identify a chemical, identify its hazards, or identify a chemical by entering potential hazards. The guide is organized into three main, searchable areas:

1. An index of chemical names, synonyms, and trade names;
2. An index of Chemical Abstracts Service Registry (CAS) numbers; and
3. An index of Registry of Toxic Effects of Chemical Substances (RTECS) numbers.

The guide is available in print format, or can be downloaded from the Center for Disease Control's (CDC) website.

Did You Know? CDC, NIOSH, NIOSH pocket guide, Hazardous materials

Every year, between February 1 and April 30, all employers with 11 or more employees are required by OSHA to post occupational injury and illness summaries from the prior year.

The summary is usually a single page that compiles all of a specific company's injuries, illnesses, and fatalities by category, and the total number of days missed due to injury or illness.

Posting these summaries allows the employer to identify problem areas and work to prevent them in the future. It also allows the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) to compile figures on injuries and illnesses and determine trends. This in turn helps OSHA determine whether regulations need to be added or tweaked to reduce injuries and illnesses in specific industries.

While employers are responsible for compiling and posting the injuries and illnesses from the past year, employees should understand how and when to report an injury or illness. It is the responsibility of the employer to teach their employees how to report injuries and illnesses.

Regulatory Review Injury and illness summary, Workplace injuries

If you have not already heard, Safety Unlimited, Inc. has been selected by OSHA  to provide online versions of the 10 Hour Construction and 10 Hour General Industry courses. These courses are part of OSHA's Outreach Training Program – a program whose training aims to prevent work-related injuries, illnesses, and deaths by providing the knowledge and tools workers need to identify, correct, and prevent workplace safety and health hazards.

OSHA considers the Outreach Training Program to be an essential component of their efforts to make training available to workers and to teach them about job hazards and their rights under the Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1970.

OSHA anticipates that these training programs will be helpful to many students as an orientation to occupational safety and health. We plan to implement online versions of the 10 Hour Construction and 10 Hour General Industry in the very near future, so be sure to stay tuned to this newsletter for updates.

Company Corner OSHA Outreach Training Program, 10 Hour Construction, 10 Hour General Industry