Name: Tyler Nguyen
Company Name: County of Santa Clara, CA
City: San Jose, CA
Number of Employees:15,000

Nomination Essay:

Nomination for Safety Trainer of the Year - Tyler Nguyen

In order to maintain the level of occupational safety services provided to our employee population, I came up with creative ways ,using our limited existing human resources to both comply with local, state, and federal training mandates in addition to promoting workers on the job safety awareness. Bottom line is the county enjoyed a reduction of $8 million savings during the past three fiscal years in the costs of administering its workers' compensation self-insured program. The incident rate also went from double-digit down to 9.1 as of today. This is excellent for an organization of 15,000 employees, a public entity. For comparison purposes, in a published article by the San Jose Mercury News on April 10, 2009, Santa Clara County's incident rate per 100 employees is 9.1 versus 16.2 for San Jose (the 10th largest city in the nation). Our average cost per claim is $6151 versus $17298 for San Jose.

Some creative ways to manage safety training include:
1. On an annual basis, the County sponsors a safety seminar that allows employees to attend to receive training, to network with others, and to get continuing education credit (contact hours) to keep up their nursing licenses, professional certifications, or registrations. I am registered with the State Board of Registered Nursing as a continuing education (CE) provider and therefore have been able to provide CE points for those nurses who seek them. This is a convenience factor that allow nurses to acquire training while at work. The market value registration costs of attending a day-long safety, health & environmental training event is $250. I have been able to do it for much less, at about $85 dollars per head.

This year we will sponsor our 24th annual countywide safety seminar, slated for September 2009. This event also allows our employer to meet the requirement in the state mandated Injury & Illness Prevention Program. One of the program components states that employers need to discipline employees for safety infractions, but also need to regnize workers for safe practices. During this seminar, county executive management recognizes a few selected workers for their ideas or action that contributes to a safer workplace or saves someone from imminent harm.

2. Because of budget constraints, I do not have a trainer on staff, but rely on associates in the department to help out with training. I give guidance and input to all training provided by our small group including: New Employee Orientation, County Specifics Leadership, Training for Office Professionals, Safety for Supervisors and Managers, Safety Coordinators Forum. Many of the technical topics are addressed my our group who have had years of industry experience in the field of safety, health, and environmental management.

I find it extremely helpful to push the training out and down to the supervisor level, those employees who supervise others at work. I do this by offering a Safety Coordinator Forum every other month. At these forums, I deploy all pertinent information relating to safety management and ask that the supervisors be our "eyes and ears" to help us not only with all safety issues, but also on any item that could be addressed or remedied by incorporating the training component into it. Training is really talking to or communicating with others. It is only effective if people perceive that there is a value for them in it.

In conjunction with supervisors training, I authored a guide called "Safety for Supervisors" and have used it to train employees in the county. I have also used materials in this guide to present to other safety professionals at two recent events: Alaska's Third Annual Occupational Safety Summit in September 29-30, 2008 and 5th Annual Safety Training and Exposition, April 8-9, 2009 in Sacramento, CA.

For those unique risks and because of our limited resources, I contract with outside training vendors to supplement and provide environmental health & safety training sessions directly to employee population as the need arises.