Audit, Compliance and Risk Blog

The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) requires employers to protect their employees against possible exposure to “bloodborne pathogens (BBPs).” OSHA’s Bloodborne Pathogen Standard prescribes protections for workers occupationally exposed to blood or other potentially infectious materials (OPIM). Healthcare workers are the most obvious beneficiaries, but emergency responders and others may also be regularly at risk to these exposures.

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When it comes to hospitals we all expect the highest standard of cleanliness and yet, we want every part of our lives to be more sustainable. Of course, when hospitals are faced with a choice that puts hygiene up against sustainability, hygiene always wins. But I wonder if it’s possible to find ways for both to win?

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The U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT) defines national requirements for the transportation of hazardous materials, under what’s commonly called the Hazardous Materials Transportation Act (HMTA). DOT agencies promulgate most regulatory requirements with nationwide applicability, and delegate most administrative and oversight responsibilities to state transportation and highway patrol agencies. Delegated functions include state-level registration of motor carriers that transport hazardous materials by roadways, and licensing for their drivers.

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The US Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) regulates thousands of chemicals, through regulatory standards directing employers to reduce worker exposures. At the broadest level, employers must evaluate basic information about every potentially hazardous chemical, and provide information to employees in compliance with OSHA's Hazard Communication Standard (I’ve blogged about changing HCS requirements here, and here). OSHA’s Air Contaminants Standard provides ambient workplace air limits for hundreds of listed contaminants. OSHA also provides more tailored requirements for classes of chemicals (such as flammables), and for types of activities that pose chemical hazards (such as welding). For a small number of especially hazardous chemicals, OSHA provides a detailed standard applicable to a single chemical—examples include asbestos, benzene, and lead. On March 25, 2016, OSHA established another single-chemical standard, for respirable crystalline silica (29 CFR section 1910.1053). Most affected employers must comply by June 23, 2018; a few provisions are phased in later, and construction employers must meet most requirements by June 23, 2017.

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Federal hazardous materials transportation laws assign the Department of Transportation’s (DOT’s) Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA) general authority to designate hazardous materials and prescribe regulations for the “safe transportation of hazardous materials in intrastate, interstate, and foreign commerce.” PHMSA also prescribes criteria for handling hazardous materials, including training of personnel, inspections, and standards for operating and monitoring equipment.

These laws also authorize PHMSA and other DOT units to issue "special permits" that allow variances from federal requirements for up to two years. These special permits may be renewed for up to two years each time (and up to four years for variances from transport routing requirements). In 2012 “MAP-21” (Moving Ahead for Progress in the 21st Century Act) directed PHMSA to review special permits that had been in place for at least 10 years, and to adopt regulatory revisions by October 1, 2015. PHMSA was to apply the following factors to determine the suitability for adopting a special permit into its hazardous materials regulations (HMR):

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The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) recommends that all employers create and maintain plans for dealing with emergency conditions. In particular, some OSHA standards require employers to create an emergency action plan (EAP) as part of their compliance programs.

Even if your organization is not required to do so, you should consider the benefits or being prepared to conduct emergency responses and evacuations. Well-developed emergency plans and proper employee training (so employees understand their roles and responsibilities) likely will result in fewer and less severe employee injuries and less structural damage to the facility during emergencies. A poorly prepared plan, on the other hand, likely will lead to a disorganized evacuation or emergency response, exacerbating confusion, injury, and property damage.

Which Employers Require An EAP?

The following OSHA Standards require you to prepare an EAP as part of your compliance with their requirements:

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Effective February 16, 2016, the U.S. Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) has revised the requirements for logging of commercial motor vehicle (CMV) drivers’ hours of service or “HOS.” A motor carrier operating CMVs must install and require each of its drivers to use an electronic logging device (ELD) to record the driver’s duty status no later than December 18, 2017.

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Employees in the health care and social service sectors suffer workplace violence at much higher rates than in most other sectors, largely because of the higher risk from their patients and clients. In response to these risks, worker protection agencies and professional organizations have developed guidelines for workplace violence prevention in these sectors. Increasingly, worker protection laws and regulations are being revised to require these activities. Most recently, in December 2015 California has proposed to expand state requirements for security plans to include explicit workplace violence prevention programs.

Existing Requirements For Security Plans

California adopted hospital security plan requirements in 1993. Since 2010, these require state-licensed hospitals to implement security plans, including all of the following actions: Read More

The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) requires most employers to prepare and maintain records of occupational injuries and illnesses (I&I Logs) as they occur. OSHA also requires employers to post an annual I&I Summary in each “establishment” within their workplace by February 1, summarizing that workplace’s I&Is during the previous calendar year. Delegated state-run programs impose comparable requirements.

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Laboring under a host of compliance requirements, a weary environmental health and safety professional might be tempted to mutter “Well, what if I don’t?” Of course the answer is that the organization–and maybe the EH&S professional–could face civil and even criminal sanctions from regulators and prosecutors. These sanctions are written into the laws and regulations in order to encourage compliance and punish non-compliance, and they’ve just been revised…but how effective is such encouragement?

Activists and politicians have long argued that potential punishments might be treated as a cost of doing business, and if that cost is low enough compared with the cost of compliance that some organizations may choose to ignore the requirements and take their chances. This possibility grows over time, if nominal penalty levels are left unchanged while inflation effectively reduces them.

To counteract inflationary erosion of these the effects of inflation, for the past quarter century U.S. federal law has directed most agencies to make periodic “cost of living” adjustments to maximum available civil penalty levels (there are no provisions for standing periodic adjustments to criminal penalties). The first version of this approach was enacted by the Federal Civil Penalties Inflation Adjustment Act of 1990, which directed the President to report annually on any adjustments made under existing statutory authority, and to calculate what such adjustments would have been if more agencies had the authority to make them.

How Has The Act Worked Since 1996?

Congress amended the Act in 1996 to authorize and require most agencies to make inflation adjustments every four years. The exceptions precluded cost of living adjustments to penalties under the following:

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