Emergency rooms treat roughly a quarter of a million playground-associated injuries every year, yet the majority of these injuries are avoidable. As the amount of injuries increases, it is important for public entities to design, build and maintain playgrounds to better promote safety. Playgrounds should balance injury prevention with the desire to promote children’s ability to test their limits, build muscle, gain confidence and learn personal interaction.

Some public entities may not have any or enough loss control (LC) experts to help them eliminate or reduce the losses that arise from unsafe acts and conditions. The public entity leaders may believe that they cannot afford an LC expert, even though the costs of incidents that lead to claims against the public entity are usually many times the cost of an in-house or contract LC expert. 

You are now assigned safety and risk management duties for your organization. Now what? Where do you start? Fundamentally, the past is one of the best indicators of the future. Therefore, it is best to get a snapshot of what the lack of safety and ineffective risk management has produced in the form of losses or claims. For risk control plan building purposes, it is recommended to review and analyze claims data from a minimum of 48 months from the most current data. In this context, analyze means to determine which categories of claims are the most frequent and/or severe.

PRIMA’s 2017 Annual Conference in Phoenix, AZ was a lot of fun due to the people I met, the things I learned, and the new experiences I had. My trip began on Sunday, June 4th. Later that day, I attended a Welcome Reception in the Valley of the Sun Ballroom where I had a great time networking and listening to a live band.

As an international student, I am honored to be selected as one of PRIMA’s Student Scholarship recipients. I would like to share some of my experiences and takeaways from PRIMA’s 2017 Annual Conference.

I attended several education sessions at the Annual Conference. All of these sessions were amazing and the speakers gave specific examples and clear explanations that provided me with insight into the public risk management world.

The Harvard Business Review previously reported that 70% of all change initiatives fail.[1]This statistic acts as a reminder to leaders of one very important fact: The mere existence of a goal, however worthy, is not enough to enact change. Youth-serving organizations would be hard-pressed to identify a worthier goal than abuse prevention. So, what is that extra ingredient needed to create a culture of safety?