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NATIONAL SAFETY MANAGEMENT SOCIETY
Professional Society With A Management Purpose
Our Mission...
In 1966, the Society is conceived by a small group of safety people with a concern for lack of top-management support of programs to prevent accidents. By association, it becomes evident that this support is generally due to the feeling that accident prevention is not a tool for decision making.
Others gather with similar beliefs, and gradually a set of concepts is developed to base a new approach to accident prevention. This is needed to support a well-promoted technological side of safety. However, law, regulations, and industrial safety standards are not enough.
What We Stand For...
Until the 1960’s, the word management rarely is associated with the function of safety other than to complain about its lack of attention or support.
The engineering approach to solving a safety problem has been the accepted basis of control wrapped up in law, codes, rules, and standards. To most industrialists and the general public, safety action is policing violations and writing citations—a concept hardly meriting being a part of administrative strategy or considering it a tool for improved decision making.
The National Safety Management Society believes that without the active involvement of the whole management system in preventing operational errors or mishaps, the safety movement is static. Change is needed. Understanding does not begin on the production floor or in the front office. It begins by integrating it with formal education—especially that of our future managers.
Accidents result from errors: symptoms of unplanned or incorrectly directed activity manifested by personal injury, property damage, and other costs that down-grade the mission regardless of objectives of the enterprise.
Reasons for operational mishaps can be scientifically traced to acts and conditions, but these mishaps are caused by failures of the system, mismanagement, and communication breakdowns. Each of these failure modes, with others, forms a new discipline needed to support an organized body of knowledge for educational institutions to combat the high incident of accidental death, disease, and injury.
Who We Are...
Beginning with a handful of dedicated safety managers, the National Safety Management Society has grown into a strong group of safety and management practitioners who have a vested interest in improving management position as well as promoting the function of safety as a tool of management through extended educational means. Charter of incorporation as a non-profit organization is acquired on June 11, 1968, from the Government of the District of Columbia.
In 1980, the Society assumes an unique status, becoming exclusively engaged in “charitable, educational, and scientific research purposes; and offering through its membership safety educational services without bias to all who desire to affiliate and cooperate. The Society supports but does not promote active professionalism, per se, leaving this to groups already established for this purpose. Nor do we engage in the examination or licensing of certification for safety managers, engineers, or any other such titled individuals to denote professionalism.
What We Do...
Our long-range objective is to establish a forum to create a unified and systematically arranged body of safety knowledge dealing with theory and principles of effective accident prevention. Our immediate goal is to organize those who feel that the urgency of this problem promotes positive action.
As a group, we intend to increase general awareness of safety as a viable part of management decision-making through education. Technical research will be the support.
We work with any organization, without bias, public or private, that will sponsor or donate to the support of our objectives. We invite affiliation with schools of higher learning to promote the science and practice of safety management, encouraging the requirement of studies in accident prevention in all courses leading to degrees in business administration.
We sponsor and promote seminars and workshops designed to advance the knowledge needed by practitioners as to how safety activities may be better managed and more directly related to broad management functions.
We publish a monthly newsletter, a professional journal, and a quarterly publication appearing in Occupational Hazards Magazine, to encourage communication of ideas in order to improve accident prevention through concepts and principles of management.
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