In today's episode, Dr. Ayers discusses performing a risk assessment and having to decide whether to wear a helmet when swimming with horses.
The Occupational Safety Leadership Podcast
Episode 221 - Risk Assessment - Horseback Riding and Swimming Horses
Welcome to the Occupational Safety Leadership Podcast, episode number 221. And in today's episode, we're going to talk about a non-traditional risk assessment that I had to do while I was doing some time off, was with my family. And we decided that we were going to go do horseback riding. And along with this, the horses, you would go swimming with the horses, you don't lay. And so, the horses are the ones that actually swim in, you're just kind of holding on. And I don't know if anybody out there has seen the old westerns when they're going to cross a river, they just take the saddle off, kind of hold on, bear back on the horse, hold on to the main and just kind of go across the river, get to the other side, kind of do all that stuff again. It's not quite as similar, we did the ocean, you know, which was kind of neat with the waves coming in and all that stuff then, horses swim remarkably well. And so, of course, this isn't the focus of the podcast. The focus was, I showed up, I went to check in everybody. Everybody was still getting ready at the car, I was already done, so I went up there to go check in, walk into the people and, you know, of course, you sign your life saying that you won't swim if you drowned, all that stuff, you know, it's understandable, you know. And then it got to the point where they asked if I wanted to wear a helmet or not. And I thought about it, like, well, I'm a really strong swimmer and I'm really good at riding the horses, but I should probably have a helmet on to ride the horses, but I also know the horses are swimming and then I did something I never thought that I would do. I literally looked at the sign in sheet and because it's really small groups, you could go back and look for a whole week on the sign in sheet and just, I didn't see where a single person opted for the helmet because in my mind, I thought, well, I do need a helmet to ride a horse, but then I also thought, I've never gone with a horse in the water. And of course, if I get knocked off, well, now I have to swim back to shore, then I thought, well, helmet's pretty heavy. I feel that I'm a good swimmer, but the helmet is pretty heavy. So this was something that I thought that I would never do. I literally looked and thought, I wonder what everybody else did. But when I saw that not a single person in a couple of weeks had opted for the helmet, I said, okay, that's going to help my risk assessment and help factor it in things. But I also thought, I wonder if that's what employees do. Maybe when they're looking at what do I wear for PPE, do I follow procedures, do I follow things and do I really sit down and read and assess the risk or do I look around and see what others are doing and maybe I don't want to rock that rock that rock the boat and be different, you know, or maybe I want to just blend in or if everybody else is doing this and I haven't seen any bad effects. Much like with me, I thought, well, I didn't see any bad effects. Nobody drowned in those couple of weeks, you know. I opted to follow the crowd and go with the crowd and even as a, I hate to say a season because I do feel old and not seasoned, but even as a seasoned safety professional, it's probably the first time that I thought, let me just look and see what others have done out there so and I think this could be happening to people in the workplace when it comes to the different hazards. They look around and say, well, if nobody's wearing gloves, why should I wear gloves, you know. If everybody took their hard hat off, maybe I should take mine off, you know, just, just, so I think that's for me at least it helped me to understand when I would walk up to a situation and think to myself, you know, I can't believe that they came up with a different conclusion than me, you know. So for me, this was a very eye-opening experience because I think most of us believe that others are going to think and act the same way that we would, you know. They made a bad decision, they might have felt rushed, but you know, we all kind of think and feel the same way. And with that, I think we should all go back and take another assessment of our workplace and when we see where people skip a procedure, don't wear some PPE, you know, whatever the deal is, kind of, kind of sit back and say, well, have they witnessed others and know bad effects and they don't have a frame of reference to say, well, I have to do it because I have seen some bad effects out there. And with that episode number 221 is complete. We did a little off-time risk assessment. Now for the people who do this all day, every day, at this place that we went to, you know, for them, this is a occupation. For me, it was fun, of course. So it was just another way of doing a risk assessment. We do these all day, every day, whether we're having fun or we're at work, luckily for me, work is pretty fun. And with that episode, 221 is complete. I want to thank you for joining me. My name is Dr. David Ayers. Thank you and have a safe day.
In today’s episode, Dr. Ayers discusses performing a risk assessment and having to decide whether to wear a helmet when swimming with horses.