Services
We are dedicated to providing you with resources and recommendations to make your workplace safer! There are several different ways NHSC can help you protect your workers from heat-related injuries and illnesses.
Heat Safety Plan Review
NHSC is fully equipped to review your current heat safety procedures and policies and provide recommendations to enhance heat safety. These recommendations will be tailored to your specific work environment and will work to: (1) follow current best practices for heat safety (2) limit interruptions to your standard work procedures (3) recommend feasible, cost effective solutions, and (4) reduce financial losses associated with heat stress (i.e., promote health and safety AND productivity).
If you do not have a heat safety plan in place, NHSC will create one for you based on your work environment, worker characteristics and the physical demands of the job.
We can also review or create your emergency action plan (EAP) for exertional heat stroke to ensure your worksite is prepared to perform the appropriate steps to have a worker succumbing to exertional heat stroke.
On-Site Heat Safety Assessments
The NHSC can also travel to your worksite to:
- Help identify heat hazards your workers may encounter
- Communicate with workers and safety personnel on current strategies and barriers
- Provide heat safety solutions that are perfectly tailored to your organization and worksite!
Seeing your worksite and interacting with your workers will allow NHSC to see first hand what heat safety strategies and solutions are feasible to implement.
Why is this important?
- Mitigate risk of heat-related injuries and illnesses
- Improve work quality, productivity and eliminate financial losses associated with heat stress
What should we expect?
NHSC will visit for 1-2 days depending on the size of your organization. We will start with a kickoff meeting to go over the assessment process with your team who will assist us. We will have approximately 4-6 hours of job observation each day which will include observing work conditions and talking with workers. Workers should be informed of the visit prior to our arrival. A closing meeting will occur that summarizes some of the findings. A full report will be created and presented to your organization that includes:
- List of Areas of “Concern”
- Specific solutions for each area of concern
- List of supplies required based on recommendations
- Heat safety to progressively implement each solution
- Heat Safety Score- a heat safety score will be created by NHSC that reflects your current standings in regards to occupational heat safety best practices. The objective of the score is to improve heat safety practices within your organization. We plan to work with you to continuously improve your score!
Educational Services
Educating your workers on the dangers of heat is critically important to mitigate heat-related injury and illness. NHSC can create and/or perform:
- Live or recorded webinars that are specific to your organization
- On-site or virtual heat safety training
- Educational presentations (ex. Prevention, recognition of exertional heat stroke)
- Posters, infographics, and other educational materials
Research Partnerships
NHSC is dedicated to translating current research into practice to protect workers from heat stress.
On-site research initiatives
Participating in a research initiative through NHSC will give you important information on worker characteristics and risk of heat-related events, as well as, workers’ physiological responses to heat stress or heat mitigation strategies (e.g., body cooling, work to rest ratios). Moreover, NHSC can test wearable technologies used in your workplace.
You can also utilize our lab (MISSION heat lab) to examine effectiveness of various products (e.g., body cooling devices, personal protective gear) or interventions to mitigate the risk of heat-related injuries and illnesses.
