The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) is busy on several rulemaking fronts, but it’s devoting considerable resources to heat illness prevention, according to OSHA officials speaking at the NSC Safety Congress and Expo in New Orleans this week.
Andrew Levinson, director, OSHA Directorate of Standards and Guidance, said OSHA’s regulatory agenda includes an update to the Hazard Communication standard. The draft final regulation is at the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) for review. Look for the final rule to be ready in the next few months, he added. The standard is being updated to match the Globally Harmonized System (GHS) for classifying chemical hazards.
A high priority is a heat illness standard in the first half of 2024, said Levinson.
“We are looking at both indoor and outdoor work settings with high heat hazards, so if you are construction, agriculture, landscaping, anybody’s who’s doing stuff in outdoor work settings certainly,” he said. For indoor settings, “we’re certainly looking at warehousing in a number of places, commercial kitchens, commercial bakeries, foundries, and other places where there’s significant amounts of indoor generated heat.”
A new infectious disease standard is expected in the first half of 2024, said Levinson. Unlike the Bloodborne Pathogens standard, which applies in any work setting in any industry, this standard will only apply to healthcare settings. It’s specifically targeted at airborne droplet and non-bloodborne contact transmissible diseases in healthcare settings.
Another healthcare-specific standard in progress covers workplace violence. This is only in healthcare settings and social assistance sectors, Levinson noted. “This is not workplace violence in retail settings or other settings,” he said.
An emergency response update is going to OMB in the coming weeks, Levinson said. This is an update to 1910.156 fire brigade standard, which applies to industrial fire brigades, municipal emergency response, and technical rescue.
Other updates in the works include:
- Personal protective equipment and ensuring it fits all workers, particularly women
- Recordkeeping for electronic reporting
- Lockout/tagout update dealing with computer-controlled equipment
- Powered industrial truck standards
- Walking-working surfaces
- Shipyard fall protection
- Residential tree care
Increased emphasis on heat illness prevention
While the heat illness standard is going through the rulemaking process, OSHA is conducting an educational campaign on the topic.
“OSHA is not waiting to deal with heat while we’re doing the rulemaking,” said Levinson. “OSHA has a very robust heat illness prevention campaign. We have significantly updated our guidance.”
Levinson encouraged attendees to visit https://www.osha.gov/heat and use the materials to keep workers informed on how to prevent heat illness.
“We are certainly still encouraging [the use of] Water/Rest/Shade. But what we’ve been focusing on in our updates…is the importance of acclimatization,” he said. “The research shows that most people are going to get injured in the first couple of days to a week to two weeks on the job, so work hardening, easing into the work, is very important.”
Levinson said acclimatization is important when you have temporary workers who are getting picked up as day laborers, when it’s the start of heat season, or in parts of the country where it’s not normally hot and you then have a heat wave.
“What we really need folks to know is there are certain signs and symptoms that require urgent action,” he added. “When somebody is passing out, when somebody is becoming disoriented or slurring speech, feeling dizzy and faint headed, those are times you need to take immediate action to cool somebody and potentially, depending on the severity of the symptoms, call 911. So we need people to recognize that not all of the heat symptoms are the same.”
Eric Harbin, OSHA regional administrator for Region 6, said OSHA’s heat National Emphasis Program (NEP) was issued in April 2022 and continued for summer 2023. In the previous five years until the announcement of the NEP, OSHA averaged around 179 inspections per year focusing on heat, he said.
Part of the goal of the NEP was to double the number of heat-related inspections, said Harbin. In the first year, the agency did 1,500-plus inspections. In 2023, through the end of August, OSHA conducted 2,490 federal inspections.
At the end of September, OSHA put into place a pilot program targeting agricultural employers using temporary migrant workers in Regions 4 and 6 (Atlanta and Dallas) for the rest of summer 2023, Harbin said.
In mid-October, OSHA began a warehousing and distribution center NEP, targeting warehousing and distribution establishments, as well as high injury rate retail establishments, he added. The NEP involved comprehensive safety inspections with screening of heat and ergonomic health hazards.
Pre-pandemic, OSHA was averaging 32,000-33,000 inspections per year. Through the pandemic, inspections dropped in the low- to mid-20,000s. So far, more than 34,000 inspections have been conducted in 2023, Harbin said.