SIIT teaches students to work safely

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Prevention is the Cure was the theme of this year's North American Occupational Safety and Health Week, which was marked from May 5 to 11 as a time to promote the importance of preventing injury and illness in the work place.

The message that injury prevention is important is one students in the trades and technologies programs offered by the Saskatchewan Indian Institute of Technologies (SIIT) receive loud and clear, with students in many of the programs receiving safety training as part of their core curriculum.

As Guy Poncelet, director of Trades and Technologies with SIIT explained, including a safety component in the institute's trades and technological programs is important, because it helps to ingrain safety into potential workers before they even set foot on a site.

"You have to get students, especially some of the students who have never really worked in some of these situations -the less experienced, maybe younger students -to just have the safety idea part of them, so they don't have to think about safety. It's just part of the way they think," he said. "I think they're safer on the job site, when they learn it up front, some of the basics of it. And again, they don't really have to think about being safe. It just becomes second nature, if they learn it in the programs."

Not only does including safety training as part of the programs make for more safety conscious workers, it also makes those workers more attractive to potential employers, Poncelet said.

"For example, in the construction field, and some of the trades, we work with the Saskatchewan Construction Safety Association, and they developed a CD that covers a bunch of the safety training. And we use those CDs in our construction projects, and I actually use that same CD in some of my technical programs as well. And that has actually become for some employers, they won't even grant you an interview if you don't have that certificate from that safety group. So it's becoming an absolute necessity just to even get your foot in the door. Not even to get the job, but even just to get an interview."

The type and amount of safety training included in the SIIT programs varies, depending on what type of employment the students are preparing for, Poncelet said.

"WHIMIS (Workplace Hazardous Materials Information System) is quite common. We almost always do standard first aid and CPR. We do that in pretty well every program. In some of the programs we do confined spaces, H2S if they think they might be working in the gas field. Like in our process operator program, some of them might work in oil and gas. Ladder use, scaffolding safety. For some of the constructions trades, there's some specifics there-Hilti guns and how to use them safely. So there's a whole variety of types.

"I'd say we're about the same as other training programs. I'd say we probably do a little more in certain areas within our programs. I would prefer to give them a little extra on the safety side, maybe more than the job itself might demand. Most jobs have certain requirements. You have to have certain basic safety training. I guess the way I look at it, if we keep emphasizing the idea of safety, they start taking the job a little more seriously, in the sense that, 'Oh, if they keep talking about safety, maybe that means I can be hurt out there.' I think it just causes them to look a little differently at the employment they're aiming for."