"Farmstead Safety: A Family Activity" incorporates safety education in a farm safety checklist/activity. The intended goal of the activity is for farm family members and workers to learn about potential safety hazards that are commonly found on farms. They can then identify hazards on their particular farm and begin to take action to make it a safer place to work and live. Their action plans might include eliminating hazards, making safety modifications to the work site, or changing their behavior to work safely around known hazards.
The checklist is designed to be self-administered by farm family members. Components found on the farm are separated into eight different blocks with five questions in each block. Given that each farm and family is different, it is up to the family what sections of the activity are important for them to complete. Explanations of why items are important to be inspected from a safety standpoint and/or how a situation can be improved are given for each question. Space is provided on each page to rite down an action plan to correct unsafe situations.
Discussions about parenting issues concerning children on the farm (for example) are prompted by some questions. It may be possible for a family to come up with unique solutions for child safety on the farm that do not conflict with their particular cultural values.
This education-based farm safety activity is one method of providing prevention programming. With this type of self-education, we can further our goal toward reducing the number of agricultural injuries and fatalities.
This research abstract was extracted from a portion of the proceedings of "Agricultural Safety and Health: Detection, Prevention and Intervention," a conference presented by the Ohio State University and the Ohio Department of Health, sponsored by the Centers for Disease Control/National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health.
D. Chamberlain and E. Hallman, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY.
Disclaimer and Reproduction Information: Information in NASD does not represent NIOSH policy. Information included in NASD appears by permission of the author and/or copyright holder. More
