Joe is a 32 year old
pastry cook with a wife and two young daughters in primary
school. He loves his job because it allows him to be home
when his daughters come home from school.
On this particular night, Joe was making a batch of mud cakes. One was going to be a birthday cake for his youngest daughter, Jessica. He placed all the ingredients in the mixer and started it. As the mixture combined, he thought about how he would decorate the cake a little princess for his little princess, or perhaps Dorothy the Dinosaur? Still thinking of his daughter, he picked up the scraper and reached in to scrape down the mixer blade.
It all took only a couple of seconds, and his left hand had been caught by the mixer blade. He quickly turned off the machine and gently withdrew his hand from the bowl. Underneath the chocolate mix, his hand throbbed painfully.
His boss, Al, drove him to the local hospital. Joe was lucky'. He had suffered a nasty crush injury to his hand fractures and strains but no permanent damage. The hand was going to need to be in plaster for 6 weeks and he would need physiotherapy after that.
Al was keen to get Joe back to work. He knew he couldn't do everything he normally did, but there was still plenty that could be done with one good hand. He sent a copy of the pastry cook description from the job dictionary to Joe's doctor. The doctor agreed but said Joe could not do any lifting or carrying, and that he should start on 4 hours per day, gradually increasing to normal work hours. Al also notified his insurer, who recommended he conduct a thorough investigation of the incident.
Al took their advice. The first thing Al and Joe did was discuss the accident. It was my own silly fault, said Joe. I wasn't concentrating properly.
We all dream sometimes, said Al. Is there anything we can do here to make it safer if that happens?
Together they looked at the bakery, the mixer, and the way they do the job. They found that a guard had been supplied with the mixer, but never fitted. They fitted the guard and wrote a safe work procedure for using the mixer.
Joe's next job was to train all the staff in the new safe work procedure and how to use and clean the guard.
Joe was also able to supervise all the apprentices, and do much of the decorating work luckily he was right handed. He could even monitor the mixers once the ingredients had been added.
Joe was glad to be able to keep working. He felt he was still a valuable employee and his hand seemed to get better quicker than expected. After 6 weeks the plaster came off. He started physiotherapy and soon received the okay to go back to normal duties.
