The group focuses on areas where the greatest number of preventable injuries and deaths occur, including workplace safety, prescription medication abuse, teen driving, cell phone use while driving and safety in homes and communities.
History
In 1912, the first Cooperative Safety Congress was held in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The event was sponsored by the Association of Iron and Steel Electrical Engineers (a predecessor of the Association for Iron and Steel Technology). The approximately 200 attendees, representing industry and government, resolved to “organize and create a permanent body for the promotion of the safety to human life in the industries of the United States.[2]
At the Second Safety Congress in 1913, the National Council for Industrial Safety was established. It was headquartered in Chicago, Illinois and Robert W. Campbell served as first president and William H. Cameron served as secretary.[3] The name was changed to National Safety Council in 1914, to reflect the organization's expanded scope to include traffic and home safety. As membership increased, the NSC began producing posters, technical fact sheets, and other publications.[4] In 1953, the U.S. Congress and PresidentDwight D. Eisenhower recognized the importance of the NSC’s efforts with a Congressional charter to: “...arouse and maintain the interest of the people of the United States... in safety and in accident prevention, and to encourage the adoption and institution of safety methods by all persons, corporations, and other organizations."[5]
Services
Traffic safety: Motor vehicle crashes are the number one cause of unintentional injury deaths in the United States.[6] NSC works with public and private groups to help reduce the number of deaths and injuries on the road.[7][8]
Defensive driving: the National Safety Council has offered defensive driving courses since 1964 with the first approved courses in New Jersey and New York.[9][10]
First aid: NSC offers first aid training courses for safety, compliance and wellness. Classroom programs are available, as well as online training. The group is a member of the Department of Homeland Security’s Citizen Corps, a network of organizations and individuals dedicated to raising awareness about the need for preparedness. Since the NSC's Emergency Care Services program began in 1991, more than 8 million rescuers have been trained in the program.[citation needed]
Fleet safety: the NSC and partner groups have hosted various symposia to bring attention to the number of fleet driver fatalities that occur, and to develop strategies for protecting workers while on the road.
Teen driving: NSC strategy aims to reduce teen driving motor vehicle fatalities through education about graduated driver licensing (GDL), an education process proven to reduce teen driving fatalities by 20 to 40 percent by gradually exposing teen drivers to higher crash risk situations.[11] GDL puts restrictions on high crash risk factors such as passengers and nighttime driving.
Training: NSC offers training courses based on best practices for occupational safety and health, driver improvement and emergency care.
Off-the-job: NSC and multi-national corporate leaders and federal safety experts[who?] establish the first symposium on off-the-job safety in the U.S., to help reduce injury-related fatalities that occur off-the-job.
Elder falls: falls are the leading cause of injury-related deaths among older adults.[12] The NSC is part of the Falls Free Coalition, which hopes to advance a national action plan to build community awareness and support for fall prevention activities among older adults.
Safe Communities America: NSC is an affiliate of the World Health Organization’s Safe Communities program, and operates a support center and a Safe Communities Certifying Center for the United States. Communities apply for the Safe Communities designation by indicating their long-term commitment to the promotion of safety.
Organization
NSC is governed by a Board of Directors and a Board of Delegates. The board of directors manages fiduciary and strategic affairs.[13] The Board of Delegates develops the mission agenda, creates public policies, and tracks safety, health and environmental trends. More than 2,000 volunteers, drawn from NSC industry volunteer divisions, assist the boards in determining policies, operating procedures and programs to be developed and implemented by the council's professional staff.[citation needed]
The National Safety Council's network of 21 local chapters[14] conducts safety, health and environmental efforts at the community level, providing training, conferences, workshops, consultation, newsletters, updates and safety support materials, as well as networking avenues.
Members of NSC are segmented into Divisions, also known as special interest groups.[15] Division members plan and create programs for the annual NSC Congress & Expo, and participate in discussions of research findings, new concepts, trends, and ideas for safety challenges. Divisions meet twice a year. The divisions are Business & Industry, Construction, Highway Traffic Safety, Labor, Motor Transportation, and Utilities. Some divisions are further segmented into sections.
NSC Congress and Expo
Held each fall, the NSC Congress & Expo attracts 15,000 safety and health professionals,[16] plus industry suppliers from several countries. The event promotes safety and health products and services, and new safety technologies and training methods. Members attending the annual Congress can also earn continuing education credits by participating in technical sessions and professional development seminars.
National Safety Month
In 1996 NSC established June as National Safety Month, aiming to increase awareness of the leading safety and health risks and ultimately decrease the number of unintentional injuries and deaths.[17] Each week focuses on a specific safety venue: workplace, traffic, home, and community.[18]
The Occupational Safety and Health Administration is a regulatory agency of the United States Department of Labor that originally had federal visitorial powers to inspect and examine workplaces. The United States Congress established the agency under the Occupational Safety and Health Act, which President Richard M. Nixon signed into law on December 29, 1970. OSHA's mission is to "assure safe and healthy working conditions for working men and women by setting and enforcing standards and by providing training, outreach, education, and assistance." The agency is also charged with enforcing a variety of whistleblower statutes and regulations. OSHA's workplace safety inspections have been shown to reduce injury rates and injury costs without adverse effects on employment, sales, credit ratings, or firm survival.
Automotive safety is the study and practice of automotive design, construction, equipment and regulation to minimize the occurrence and consequences of traffic collisions involving motor vehicles. Road traffic safety more broadly includes roadway design.
Road traffic safety refers to the methods and measures used to prevent road users from being killed or seriously injured. Typical road users include pedestrians, cyclists, motorists, vehicle passengers, horse riders, and passengers of on-road public transport.
Defensive driving describes the practice of anticipating dangerous situations, despite adverse conditions or the mistakes of others when operating a motor vehicle. It can be achieved by adhering to general guidelines, such as keeping a two- or three-second gap between the driver's vehicle and the vehicle in front to ensure adequate space to stop. It is a form of training for drivers that goes beyond road rules and the basic mechanics of driving techniques. Defensive driving reduces the risk of collisions and improves road safety.
The National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act was enacted in the United States in 1966 to empower the federal government to set and administer new safety standards for motor vehicles and road traffic safety. The Act was the first mandatory federal safety standards for motor vehicles. The Act created the National Highway Safety Bureau. The Act was one of a number of initiatives by the government in response to increasing number of cars and associated fatalities and injuries on the road following a period when the number of people killed on the road had increased 6-fold and the number of vehicles was up 11-fold since 1925. The reduction of the rate of death attributable to motor-vehicle crashes in the United States represents the successful public health response to a great technologic advance of the 20th century—the motorization of the United States.
Graduated driver licensing systems (GDLS) are designed to provide new drivers of motor vehicles with driving experience and skills gradually over time in low-risk environments. There are typically three steps or stages through which new drivers pass. They begin by acquiring a learner's permit, progress to a restricted, probationary or provisional license, followed by receipt of a full driver's license. Graduated drivers' licensing generally restricts nighttime, expressway, and unsupervised driving during initial stages, but lifts these restrictions with time and further testing of the individual, eventually concluding with the individual attaining a full driver's license.
Transportation safety in the United States encompasses safety of transportation in the United States, including automobile crashes, airplane crashes, rail crashes, and other mass transit incidents, although the most fatalities are generated by road incidents annually killing 32,479 people in 2011 to over 42,000 people in 2022. The number of deaths per passenger-mile on commercial airlines in the United States between 2000 and 2010 was about 0.2 deaths per 10 billion passenger-miles. For driving, the rate was 150 per 10 billion vehicle-miles: 750 times higher per mile than for flying in a commercial airplane.
Injury prevention is an effort to prevent or reduce the severity of bodily injuries caused by external mechanisms, such as accidents, before they occur. Injury prevention is a component of safety and public health, and its goal is to improve the health of the population by preventing injuries and hence improving quality of life. Among laypersons, the term "accidental injury" is often used. However, "accidental" implies the causes of injuries are random in nature. Researchers prefer the term "unintentional injury" to refer to injuries that are nonvolitional but often preventable. Data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control show that unintentional injuries are a significant public health concern: they are by far the leading cause of death from ages 1 through 44. During these years, unintentional injuries account for more deaths than the next three leading causes of death combined. Unintentional injuries also account for the top ten sources of nonfatal emergency room visits for persons up to age 9 and nine of the top ten sources of nonfatal emergency room visits for persons over the age of 9.
The Association for Safe International Road Travel is a non-profit, humanitarian organization that promotes road travel safety through education and advocacy. Rochelle Sobel, president and founder of ASIRT, created the organization in 1995, in response to her son Aron's death in a bus crash in Turkey. ASIRT helped found the US Congressional Caucus on Global Road Safety, and is an internationally influential and active organization. Working under the premise that road crashes are predictable and preventable, ASIRT serves the global community in a variety of ways to help reduce injuries and deaths and the associated social and economic impacts that result from them.
Around the world, nearly 250 million children, about one in every six children, ages 5 through 17, are involved in child labor. Children can be found in almost any economic sector. However, at a global level, most of them work in agriculture (70%). Approximately 2.4 million adolescents aged 16 to 17 years worked in the U.S. in 2006. Official employment statistics are not available for younger adolescents who are also known to work, especially in agricultural settings.
Safe Kids Worldwide is a global non-profit organization working to prevent childhood injury through research, community outreach, legislative advocacy and media awareness campaigns. Safe Kids Worldwide has over 400 coalitions in 49 states, and has partners in over 30 countries. The proclaimed mission of Safe Kids Worldwide is "protecting kids from unintentional injuries, the number one cause of death for children in the United States." It is a 501(c) organization.
The American Trucking Associations (ATA), founded in 1933, is the largest national trade association for the trucking industry. ATA represents more than 37,000 members covering every type of motor carrier in the United States through a federation of other trucking groups, industry-related conferences, and its 50 affiliated state trucking associations. Former Governor of Kansas Bill Graves was replaced by Chris Spear as the ATA's president and CEO in July 2016.
A traffic collision, also called a motor vehicle collision, occurs when a vehicle collides with another vehicle, pedestrian, animal, road debris, or other moving or stationary obstruction, such as a tree, pole or building. Traffic collisions often result in injury, disability, death, and property damage as well as financial costs to both society and the individuals involved. Road transport is the most dangerous situation people deal with on a daily basis, but casualty figures from such incidents attract less media attention than other, less frequent types of tragedy. The commonly used term car accident is increasingly falling out of favor with many government departments and organizations, with the Associated Press style guide recommending caution before using the term. Some collisions are intentional vehicle-ramming attacks, staged crashes, vehicular homicide or vehicular suicide.
Worker road safety refers to the economic, societal, and legal ramifications of protecting workers from automobile-related injury, disability, and death. Road traffic crashes are a leading cause of occupational fatalities throughout the world, especially in developing countries. In addition to the suffering of the workers and their families, businesses and society also bear direct and indirect costs. These include increased insurance premiums, the threat of litigation, loss of an employee, and destruction of property.
An occupational fatality is a death that occurs while a person is at work or performing work related tasks. Occupational fatalities are also commonly called "occupational deaths" or "work-related deaths/fatalities" and can occur in any industry or occupation.
The Safe America Foundation is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization working nationally and headquartered in Marietta, Georgia. The organization was founded in 1994 and partners with corporate, government, public and private sector organizations and non-profit organization to improve the awareness of safety and preparedness in the United States. The Safe America Foundation operates an Emergency Preparedness program and Driver Education program.
Luchemos por la Vida is a nonprofit organization whose purpose is to help prevent traffic accidents in Argentina. It promotes road traffic safety and focuses on contributing to safe traffic behavior. The organization does not receive financial support from government agencies and is mainly held together by volunteers, private firms, and community servicemen. In 2010, statistics showed that approximately 21 deaths occurred per day in Argentina along with 100,000 injured and severe vehicle damage caused by traffic incidents.
People who are driving as part of their work duties are an important road user category. First, workers themselves are at risk of road traffic injury. Contributing factors include fatigue and long work hours, delivery pressures, distractions from mobile phones and other devices, lack of training to operate the assigned vehicle, vehicle defects, use of prescription and non-prescription medications, medical conditions, and poor journey planning. Death, disability, or injury of a family wage earner due to road traffic injury, in addition to causing emotional pain and suffering, creates economic hardship for the injured worker and family members that may persist well beyond the event itself.
The National Child Passenger Safety Board, managed by the National Safety Council, maintains the quality and integrity of the National Child Passenger Safety Certification Training Program in the United States. The program is used to train and certify child passenger safety technicians and instructors in order to assist caregivers in safe transportation of children. Three of the most common issues that put children at risk: improperly used or installed safety seats, hot cars, and teen drivers. The Board is not limited to keeping kids safe in cars in the U.S. The work of Dr. Marilyn J. Bull to help shape automobile safety law in Chile was highlighted in March 2017 by AAP News.
National Safety Month (NSM) is an annual month-long observance in the United States each June.
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