Preventing Accidents Using a Kitchen Safety Checklist

The other day I heard about a restaurant worker who was injured while preparing glasses for the bar. It seems the standard procedure was to place the glasses in the icemaker bin to chill. On this particular day, a young woman took hot glasses from the dishwasher and shoved them into the ice. The shock cooling was too much, and one of the glasses shattered into piercing shards, badly slicing her hand. While the manager rushed her to the emergency room at the local hospital for stitches, the staff stayed behind to clean the ice, blood and broken glass out of the icemaker.

In retrospect, the gruesome scene was simply an "accident waiting to happen," but as a restaurant owner it's important to turn around those sorts of situations. Instead of waiting for accidents to happen, we need to look for accidents we can prevent, and then take the steps to ensure that we do prevent them.

A Workplace Safety Plan

The first step in developing a kitchen safety checklist is to complete a hazards inventory, which identifies in detail all the existing and potential hazards.

When it comes to creating a safe workplace environment, the key ingredient is a proper attitude toward safety. After all, a safe work environment isn't something that just happens by "accident." Rather, it takes a keen eye, dedication to detail, and constant attention. We need to plan for a safe work environment, and then follow through with the steps that lead to the desired result.

Having a safe work environment is more than just a pleasantry; it's essential. Workplace accidents are an expensive proposition and, in some cases, can be the total undoing of an operation. A lawsuit for an injury can be outrageously expensive, and even without any personal injury, a mindlessly simple oversight can easily lead to something as serious as an after-hours fire. Either one can put you out of business overnight. To help prevent such occurrences, many operators use a kitchen safety checklist, which identifies hazards and provides our employees with the procedures and precautions to avoid them.