We have all seen it… the person assigned to be the PRCS Attendant (and Fire Watches suffer this infliction as well) are the youngest, weakest, least trained, least experienced, lowest paid, and most incapable person on the job/team. As I have written about before, one of my former employers actually but an age restriction on the role as we just grew tired of our field audits always finding some 18-20-year-old son or nephew/niece working the summer and not having a clue how to perform his/her duties. They were actually hired to perform FW and Attendant duties because they were the cheapest labor and “anyone can do these jobs“. Makes your blood boil right?
But recently we came across an incident where the PRCS Attendant was assigned the job due to his “restricted duty injury”, which just happened to be to his dominant shoulder and it was incapacitated in a brace/sling. Yes, you heard that right, workers on “restricted duty” were assigned Attendant Duties. We even found a few cases the worker’s injury would have been a Lost-Time injury, but the business could and would bring them back for these “attendant duties” so as to not incur the LT and instead have a “Restricted Duty Case”. Now is your blood boiling? And I will bet you a steak dinner this practice of using PRCS Attendant and FW duties in this manner is being done at many other sites – we see it in our work at least annual – especially with the embedded contractors at these large facilities.
But one day it came to bite them in the a_s!!! There was a need to perform a non-entry rescue and the attendant was unable to perform their duties. Luckily, it turned out not to be an atmospheric condition that caused the entrant to lose consciousness, it was a personal medical episode, but it was a learning event for this global chemical company. We were asked to assist in the investigation and corrective countermeasures and this is what we came up with…
