SAFETYTHROUGHDESIGN^®

Machine designers know that workers do not always follow the instructions and warnings that are provided with machines or equipment. Workers are human. They often make mistakes because they can become bored, careless, complacent, fatigued, inattentive and over confident in the course of performing their duties.

Prudent machine designers, on the other hand, understand machines and how workers interact with them. Machine designers foresee uses and misuses of equipment by the end user and design accordingly. It is the duty of designers and manufacturers to identify and eliminate or guard hazards before the machine or equipment is utilized.

Hazard identification and elimination must be done before placing an instruction or warning on a machine with the mistaken idea that workers will follow a procedure or heed a warning each and every time. When used alone, procedures and warnings cannot guarantee that adequate safety will be insured. A higher standard in machine design must be applied, that of SAFETYTHROUGHDESIGN^®.

Designing machinery with regard to safety is best accomplished through application of the process of the well-known and widely accepted methodology of the "Safety Hierarchy." The Safety Hierarchy is an ordered set of design criteria that should be incorporated into the machine design by the machinery or product designer in the following order:

1. Design out the hazard;
2. If you cannot design out the hazard, provide safeguarding of the hazard;
3. If safeguarding is not feasible, warn the operator of the hazard; and,
4. If warning the operator is not possible, set up procedures to avoid the hazard.

The approach we use in our forensic analysis, especially in machine injury cases, is based on the concept of SAFETYTHROUGHDESIGN^®, the process of identifying hazards, assessing risks and implementing a hierarchy of safety factors that are important to injury reduction methods.

The Warren Group is so committed to promoting the concept of Safety Through Design, that we acquired the trademark, "SAFETYTHROUGHDESIGN^®" in 2004.