CHARLESTON AIR FORCE BASE, S.C. –
An Air Mobility Command assessment team has been on Charleston AFB since April 14 and will be leaving today after conducting a week-long assessment to start the implementation of the Voluntary Protection Program.
"The VPP is an Occupational Safety and Health Administration program that recognizes organizations with superior performance in safety and health management," said Maj. Evan East, 437th Airlift Wing VPP manager.
The initiative to implement the OSHA VPP was started in 2005 with the Defense Department's Defense Safety Oversight Council wanting to decrease mishaps by 75 percent by the end of fiscal 2008. To help reach this goal, the Department of Defense adopted the OSHA VPP to help in this endeavor.
To see how best this program could be implemented, the Air Staff, along with DOD officials, wanted to get major command members more involved with the assessment. As Air Force and DOD officials conducted the initial assessments on bases, the number of MAJCOM members steadily increased. AMC was the first command to start sending out its own teams to look at safety and health programs of bases to see what it would take to get a base to meet OSHA VPP requirements.
During the past week, the AMC assessment team toured Charleston AFB to look at safety practices already in place at various locations, such as medical, maintenance and civil engineering, to see what needed to be changed or added. After the assessment, the team will release a gap analysis to show where the base currently is with safety requirements, where the base needs to be to meet the OSHA VPP standards and what it needs to do to get to that point. When the team leaves, the gap analysis will be available via the Web at a site to be determined.
While the assessment team only spent a week looking at the safety practices of the base, it will take anywhere from two to three years for the base to work through the recommendations made in the gap analysis.
Also, toward the end of implementation of the recommendations, air staff and AMC officials will visit the base again to conduct a mock audit to see how far the base has progressed in meeting VPP standards.
When a base is found to be prepared, it will put in an application for the federal-level OSHA to verify that it has met the criteria for the VPP. If they have, the base will then receive star recognition -- the highest level bestowed by OSHA on a base for safety practices.
According to Major East, the AMC representatives looked at people, places and paperwork. The teams interviewed base senior leadership, which included the wing commander, civilian union president and selected members from the base and employees they encountered while visiting the workcenters.
"The assessment provided a snapshot of the safety and health culture," said Philip Driskill, AMC occupational health and safety specialist from Scott AFB, Ill. "It identifies strength and areas for improvement so the base can focus their resources to improve those areas."
"Presently the Air Force operates under a compliance-based system," Major East said. "We comply with the minimum levels directed to meet current standards and we investigate mishaps that occur, searching for indicators we can use after-the-fact to keep the mishap from recurring."
The goal of VPP is for Airmen to identify safety hazards in work centers and correct them so they can take ownership in the safety and health program and prevent mishaps before they occur.
"Under the VPP principles, we will operate under a performance-based system where we meet and exceed the minimum standards and actively look for ways to continuously improve our safety and health management," said Major East.
While the main focus of the OSHA VPP initiative is to bring mishap levels down in the Air Force, team members are hoping it will spill into the off-duty time of Air Force members, which, in some ways, is similar to the wingman concept.
"Whenever there is a strong safety and health culture, generally it carries over into a person's off-duty time," Mr. Driskill said. "Therefore, VPP blends well with the wingman concept: Airmen taking care of Airmen."