Since this is a brand new blog, let me clarify for our readers my intended purpose for creating this blog and what I hope we can accomplish.

• This is a safety-related blog. But “safety” can mean different things to different people. Types of safety could include, but are not limited to, personal safety, financial safety, automotive safety, firearm safety, food safety, pharmaceutical safety, internet safety . . . So let me clarify right off the bat; the focus of this blog is occupational (work) safety and health. And because our readers are primarily based in the United States, it will be skewed towards that audience (although we welcome questions, comments and advice from all readers and safety professionals).
• This blog will focus on the framework provided by OSHA in their newly drafted “Safety and Health Program Management Guidelines”. These voluntary guidelines are based on seven key elements that provide the structure upon which you can build (or improve) your health and safety program, yet are generic enough to allow some flexibility and variation in how your particular safety and health program can be implemented and managed to fit the needs of your particular organization. This blog does not address compliance with specific OSHA regulations (we have another blog for that), but rather focuses on these voluntary guidelines for program management.
• This blog, like the guidelines referenced above, is geared towards helping small to mid-sized organizations, as many of them tend to have a less formal safety program; or, they may not even have a safety program at all. So Mom and Pop are our focus, not the DuPont’s and Alcoa’s of the world. But don’t think we mean to exclude those readers who work at large companies or organizations with highly-successful safety programs already in place – for it is you who have already gone through a lot of the same things faced by our readers, and we need your help to educate, answer questions, offer advice, and provide resources for that portion of our audience.
• Because helping smaller organizations is the focus of this blog, we will focus on simple concepts especially at the beginning, and build on those over time. So don’t get too excited when we discuss things like accident investigation or job safety analysis in very simple terms, as opposed to incorporating some of the “deeper” terminology and techniques that might be utilized by safety practitioners who already have very mature, highly-advanced safety programs in place.
• This success of this blog will depend on the input of everyone; workers, supervisors, business owners, safety managers, and safety consultants alike. There are no stupid questions, and there will be no nasty or insulting responses. Only relevant and constructive questions, opinions and advice will be posted.

My plan is to start off the next post by discussing definitions for five key terms related to occupational safety and health. This will make sure we are all on the same page when we use these terms in our future blog posts and comments. So check back often, and I hope you hop on board with our new safetyconsultant.net blog.