Yesterday we looked at the growing problem of obesity in America and at its serious consequences for your employees’ health and your organization’s bottom line. Today we’ll focus on the related issue of heart attacks, and how you can help your employees lower their risk.
In order to reduce the risk of heart attack, you must first understand the causes and contributing factors.
The heart receives oxygen-rich blood from the lungs and sends it throughout the body. A heart attack occurs when a clot blocks an artery that carries the blood. Blockages damage the heart muscle within minutes. Within hours, the damage may be so great that it prevents the heart from functioning.
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While some risk factors for heart attacks can be prevented or controlled, others cannot, including a family history of heart disease, age, or being male.
According to BLR’s 7-Minute Safety Trainer, heart attack risk factors that can be prevented or controlled include:
- Being overweight, which makes your heart work too hard
- High cholesterol levels and diets high in cholesterol and saturated fat, which clog and block the arteries
- Smoking, which narrows blood vessels, increases heart rate, and doubles heart attack risk
- Lack of exercise, which can increase body weight and cholesterol levels
- Stress, which can trigger health problems and weaken the heart
- High blood pressure, which makes the heart work harder and weakens it
- Diabetes, which, if uncontrolled, increases cholesterol levels
It goes without saying that if you smoke, you should stop—that is the single best way to lower your risk of a heart attack.
Another good risk-reduction step is to improve your diet. Ways you can do this include:
- Eating fresh fruits and vegetables and whole grain breads, cereals, pasta, and rice
- Avoiding saturated fats like butter, “junk food,” fried food, creams, and gravies
- Eating steamed, broiled, and baked foods and low- or nonfat dairy products
- Restricting salt intake to keep blood pressure down
- Checking packaged food labels for sodium content
- Substituting pepper or other seasonings for sodium
- Avoiding alcohol to keep blood pressure down (and if you’re diabetic)
If you do experience symptoms of a heart attack, you should take immediate action. Get to a hospital immediately if you experience:
- Chest pain that lasts longer than 10 minutes. This could range from slight discomfort to pressure or tightness to crushing pain.
- Pain that radiates to the left shoulder, arm, back, teeth, and/or jaw even if you rest, change position, or take medicine.
In addition, you should promptly tell your doctor about such other potential heart-problem symptoms as:
- Frequent angina—chest pain that goes away when you rest (It’s a sign your heart needs more oxygen.)
- Shortness of breath
- Weakness
- Anxiety or restlessness
- Dizziness, fainting, and/or change in pulse rate
- Sweating
- Nausea and/or vomiting
- Pale or bluish skin
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This is just a sampling of the advice provided in the 7-Minute Safety Trainer session called “Reduce the Risk of Heart Attack.” Other sessions in its section on Personal Safety include “Dealing with Work Stress,” “Are You Ready to Quit Smoking,” “Identifying Substance Abuse,” and “Dealing with Over-the-Counter Drugs.”
All told, 7-Minute Safety Trainer contains 50 prewritten meetings covering almost every aspect of safety you’d want or need to train on, in a format designed to be taught in as little as 7 minutes. You can view a complete table of contents here, but among the major topics are:
—Confined spaces
—Electrical safety
—Fire safety/response
—HazCom
—Machine guarding and lockout/tagout
—Material handling
—PPE use and care
—Housekeeping/slips, trips, and falls
—and dozens more
Just make as many copies as needed of the included handouts and quizzes, and you’re ready to train. You can view materials from a sample module here.
Equally important is that when new or changed regulations compel new training topics or training needs to be freshened, the program ships new meetings every quarter. This service is included in the program price, which averages just over a dollar a working day. In fact, this is one of BLR’s most popular safety programs.
If you’d like to personally evaluate 7-Minute Safety Trainer and see how it can build safety awareness, we’ll be happy to send it to you for 30 days, on a no-cost, no-obligation trial basis. Just let us know and we’ll arrange it.