Energy Based Safety: A Scientific Approach to Preventing Serious Injuries & Fatalities

In this podcast episode, Darrel Nickerson discusses UNB’s occupational health & safety certification programs with an emphasis on the importance of continuous learning for safety professionals. UNB’s programs are designed to enhance knowledge and skills in safety management and leadership, featuring online, self-paced courses with over 12,000 students enrolled. 

Transcript

Perley Brewer   0:12
Welcome. Welcome to today's podcast. My name is Pearly Brewer and I will be your host. Today's podcast guest is Doctor Matthew Hollowell. Dr. Hollowell is a president's teaching scholar and endowed professor of construction engineering at the University of Colorado in Boulder. He earned a BS and Ms. in civil engineering.
Engineering and APHD with a focus on construction, engineering and occupational health and safety before his academic career, he worked in construction as a laborer, project engineer and quality inspector doctor. Hollowell specializes in construction safety research with an emphasis on the science of safety.
He has published over 100 peer reviewed journal articles on energy based safety recognition, safety, leading indicators, safety risk analysis, predictive analytics and precursor analysis. For his research, he's received National Science Foundation, career award and inaugural Thomas at Ferrell the 2nd.
Safety, leadership and Innovation award and the Construction Industry Institute Outstanding Researcher award welcome Doctor Holliwell.

Matthew Ryan Hallowell   1:19
Thank you for having me, Pearly. Nice to chat with you.

Perley Brewer   1:23
We had you roughly a year ago to talk about artificial intelligence. Today, we want to talk about the energy based safety book that that you have out right now. And I guess to start the podcast, you know a number of years ago, my kids were growing up.
And every Christmas, there was always a toy that was extremely difficult for parents to get their hands on, whether it was a tickle, me Elmo or or whatever the hot toy this season was. Right now it seems that your book energy based safety.
Fits into that category. It's a really tough book to come across. You're hot right now.

Matthew Ryan Hallowell   2:01
Hey, if I'm being compared to tickle me Elmo in terms of inventory, I'm happy.

Perley Brewer   2:05
Oh.
Well, I'll tell you, you your book, we checked around all kinds of ways to get a copy and it's again, it's like to come elbow unless you have an inside track. It can be tough. Anyway. Thank you very much for being with us today. Doctor Hallowell, where did the idea originally come from for the energy wheel?
That your book is based on.

Matthew Ryan Hallowell   2:28
Yeah. So it's a good, good question to to start things off. As you know about where, where the ideas come from, you know, so the book, the, the, the primary theme of the book is serious injury and fatality prevention. You know our our community that we've created in the the Research alliance.
Is singularly focused on eliminating serious injuries, fatalities or sifts, and the the idea for a lot of the concepts that are covered in in this book really. I mean, I can't claim them.
This has been something that's been derived from many researchers who came before me, and primarily a lot of the ideas for the research that we've done come from the community itself. So the industry practitioners who have good intuition about what needs to be studied and improved.
And so I think that's one of the magical things about the the content is that it's not just our US academics coming up with ideas that we think are important, but we really come up with ideas as a community and then go through the hard work of testing those ideas. So kind of another theme of the book is it's all evidence.
Spaced, it's all things that we've run experiments on or have some form of empirical data about. And it's not just a only a book about my thought models or my opinion on things. It's it's what we've derived from the evidence.
So all to say, you know the the book kind of the the overarching, the mission of it is, is sift prevention kind of the way towards that a kind of evidence based approach towards SIFT prevention, we've sort of.
Called it energy based safety, the energy wheels, part of it. You know you can't control what you can't identify, but it builds on that with a lot of other concepts like high energy and sticky and direct and alternative controls and and human factors and so on. So it's it's got many layers to it.
But those ideas and the and the research generally come from the industry academic collaboration.

Perley Brewer   4:39
So in your book, one of the concepts you talk about is high energy hazards. The stuff that kills you. We hear so much discussion on maybe what some people would say, the small stuff, but here you're talking about the high energy hazards, the things that can kill you, what are they and how do you find them? How do you go to go about to to locate those?

Matthew Ryan Hallowell   4:59
Yeah. So that is, I'd say the crux of of SIF prevention from our perspective is that you know there's a saying out there that the things that kill people are not the same things that hurt people, right? Another way to look at that is if we.
As a community figured out how to eliminate every two stitch cut to the finger and twisted knee and ankle sprain, that doesn't necessarily mean that we're going to be able to eliminate every trench collapse and electrical contact, etcetera. So one of the things that we you know, really leaned into and have studied a lot is well, what are?
Are those things? Are those hazards that are most likely to cause serious injuries and fatalities? So the term high energy hazard came about from a study several years ago. I think it was a 2017 study. So it's been around a little bit.
Where we found that, you know, the hypothesis was that more energy causes more harm, and that might seem like, you know, a no duh kind of, you know, finding or hypothesis. But the real question that we were after is how much energy can the human body sustain before.
A serious injury or fatality becomes the most likely outcome. You know, sifs are always possible with any kind of hazard remotely possible at least, but there's a certain threshold where you look at a hazard and you're like it's actually the most likely outcome. Is that a serious injury or fatality will occur.
So while the energy wheel is about seeing all types of hazards, high energy or casually, people call that sticky. The stuff that kills you, that's a subset of hazards that have enough energy. Where sifts are most likely. And So what I cover in the book is, you know, what is the research behind that? How do we know?
That threshold is why can we be confident in that? How does it translate across the different energy types? And we've simplified it for field use into a set of their 14 icons that describe things that are almost always high energy like suspended loads.
Electrical contacts, trench collapses, etcetera. And so that alignment with the icons and that list and the science is really important. So that's one of the things that's emphasized. I'm in practically you know, what you do is I use the maybe you and I perlie would go out to a site we say all right, I see 10 hazard.
And four of them are high energy hazards. The whole idea of SIFT prevention is those four are going to get some special treatment. And if I only have, we only have 10 minutes to have our discussion before work, I probably want to spend the lion's share of my time on those four hazards and.
Not that the other six aren't important, but if I've got limited time and I can only really talk about a few things, well, I'd pick those four and make sure I have adequate control. So that's sort of the arc of the high energy sticky type of, you know, content in the book and.
How we train and and what underpins a lot of our research in sift prevention.

Perley Brewer   8:01
So you mentioned a moment ago controls you talk in your book about direct and alternative controls, how do they differ from the controls that a lot of folks use, they refer to the triangle hierarchy of controls that most of most of our listeners probably are familiar with. How would yours be different?

Matthew Ryan Hallowell   8:21
Yeah. So I'll, I'll start answering this question by saying we had a two year long research project. Looking at we call alternative controls, which I'll explain here in a moment. What we realized in that project is that the very first step.
In that in working controls was for us to clean up our language around the word control. So if you look at how we as a safety profession have used the word control, generally speaking that word control is used to refer to everything we do in the name of safety. So for.
Example it could, it could refer to a machine guard, or you know, a barricade system. But people also use the word control to reference things like pre job, brief or training, or somebody's experience, or their awareness. And so we found as if we call everything a control then.
Nothing's really a control, right? We really need to be more specific. And so we we started by defining a control as things that are targeted, meaning they're there specifically for the hazard tangible and that we can actually see them and touch them right and verify that they.
Exists and #3 is that they're timely, meaning they're things that are physical, things that are there during the work. So what it does is it scopes out some things, which is can be somewhat controversial, like rules. It permits to some extent. Right.
Awareness and training. Not that those things are unimportant, but we're saying, you know, those aren't really controls. They're there in service of control. So take a permit, for example. Permit generally describes what controls are needed and is a verification process to ensure that the approved controls are in place.
So the permits is, but is not generally the control itself. So once we defined what control meant to us, the next step was. You know, we're really trying to do is define as a community when we, when we have a high energy hazard.
What makes a control enough right so there are different types of controls and everything like that. So the first one that we actually designed through the Edison Electric Institute during a study that we did about 2020 was that we said a control is enough generally in our our our aspirational goal.
Direct control if you will. If it's targeted. Also if it mitigates the energy so that it's strong, right, actually mitigates the energy and addresses the energy at its source, taking it from a high energy state to at least a low energy state, if not zero and 3rd is it works even if somebody makes a mistake which is actually quite a hard high bar.
For control, meaning you know if the control is a person, right? Like a spotter or control is, you know, operated by a person, like a fire extinguisher. I said, look, people make mistakes. You know, we can't have our controls reliant on human perfection. So those 3 criteria were used to define what a direct control is.
But what we found really quickly is, you know, we don't have as society, we don't have controls that meet all three of those criteria for every single type of high energy hazard. Notable examples are heavy mobile equipment. You know, sometimes you have to inspect tolerances next to a piece of machinery. I can't have a jersey barricade between.
You know the equipment of me every single time. So you know, there are lots of circumstances where direct controls are possible. That's what motivated our study on alternative controls and the basic idea with alternative controls are it's a layer of of controls that don't meet that direct control definition that help address human error. So the things like.
Signage could be spotitors and and monitoring it could be, you know, some physical obstacle like caution tape or cone toppers. But the idea is while direct controls address the energy at its source, the alternative controls really, you know, we when we can address the energy we tried to address the people and try to.
Reduce error as much as possible so you can see the hierarchy there. We want to direct control when possible. If not, we'll settle for an alternative control system while we work on direct controls. All right, now what this generally does you asked about the the hierarchy of controls.
This study really isn't well aligned with that, and I had my PhD student dig into where the original hierarchy of controls came from and come to find out it was a small group of people around the table who came up with. It wasn't based on anything more than their experience and intuition. So.
I wouldn't hold it sacred necessarily, and we thought, look, if if if one group can create it, we certainly can refine it and make it better with better evidence. And So what we did is we kind of compare and contrast for you for a second. We don't have an administrative layer in our in our hierarchy. We said, you know, those are generally the rules and procedures.
And everything are important, but they're in service of controls so that layers gone and what we ended up with is elimination of the energy reduction of the energy isolation of a person from the energy. And if we can't do that, our alternative controls. So we actually looked at it from the energy perspective. Can we get rid of it? Can we reduce it?
If we can't do either of those, can we isolate people from that physically? And if we can't do any of those three, can we reduce error as much as possible and that's the base of the of the of the pyramid? And if we can't do any of those, then we're exposed and it's inadequate. We said for a high energy hazard.
So there's a lot to say. Sorry. It's a long answer to A to a good question, but the controls piece of of of energy is is really how we save lives.

Perley Brewer   14:06
So you mentioned a moment ago a trenching situation. If you were to go to a trenching situation, what kind of safety brief would you want done?

Matthew Ryan Hallowell   14:07
Yes.

Perley Brewer   14:21
On that trenching situation.

Matthew Ryan Hallowell   14:26
Yeah. So another good question. It kind of brings up the idea like I shared some of the principles in theory, we have these tools like the energy wheel and we have high energy icons, we've got the definitions of direct and alternative controls. What the second-half of the book is all about. So the first half is about that theory. And what what this is.
Energy based safety is all about the second-half is how do you imprint that knowledge into the safety system. The activities we do to keep people safe, so pre job brief is a prominent example of that and what I would say is you know we've done a study through the CSRA, the construction Safety Research Alliance that I run at the university.
And we as a community defined, we know this 30 some odd safety professional said what does a really good pre job brief look like and how we make sure that it's sift sensitive right. We're really focusing on you know energy and control.
And so your your question's a good one. I I'll just you know I could list all the things like is it happening near where the work is taking place are people you know, is everybody involved in that conversation? Is the facilitator prepared, etcetera. There's a whole list of all of these things.
But as it relates to energy based safety, here's what I would say. We don't have all the time in the world to talk about safety. We're planning, we got to get to work. So being a realist, we really don't have much more than five or 10 minutes to do a pre job brief. What I would really like to see.
Is the lion's share of that time and energy focusing on the stuff that kills people and whether or not we have an adequate control? And if we don't, you know, if we don't have a direct control, what's the alternative control? If we don't have an alternative control that's a naked exposure to something that's most likely to kill somebody, that's a really big problem.
And so I'd want my crews focusing their time and energy in that part of the conversation and making sure everybody is really engaged in that process. We can't make people care about every single little thing, but I do think that we can make.
Good strides and and helping people understand how to address the most critical hazards and do a really good job of that. So controversially I'd say I'd take a twisted knee and an ankle sprain from time to time if it meant you know.
We didn't have a fatality somewhere down the road and that's, you know, we've thought of safety as like, safety is about everything all the time, and it hasn't served us well. The trends show that we have the same number of fatalities or same rate of fatalities. We did 17 years ago.
So clearly we need to do something different and it's a good example in the pre job of of how I think we can do that.

Perley Brewer   17:07
OK. Question for you. You drive around your community and you see a big billboard sign up in many up in front of a manufacturing operation that says, you know, 1500 days without an incident. What's your thoughts on that?

Matthew Ryan Hallowell   17:24
Well, all right. Yeah, I won't be. I won't hold any punches on this one. I think that's one of the worst practices we've ever deployed in safety. And here's why. If you're at 1500 days since the last incident and you have a recordable injury.

Perley Brewer   17:24
Based on what you just said.

Matthew Ryan Hallowell   17:40
Boy, you have all the incentive in the world to hide it and not get the care you need. Because who wants to be the one that erases the board and puts the zero up right? When then? And as the number climbs further and further, that pressure to report goes down and it goes increases increases over time, right? So.
What we what we know without any with certainty is that we have vast underreporting of recordable injuries, and so people generally aren't getting the care they need. We're not learning as we should as organizations.
And so the other thing is, is that when we do get the reporting, you do look at your recordable injury rates. It's it's so dominated by minor injuries. So if somebody has to get something in their eye has to go to the doctor, it gets washed out and they're back on the job in an hour, that's a recordable, the same way as if somebody lost their arm.
And it doesn't. Right. Right. And it it isn't right. And so the the idea with serious injury and fatality prevention is, you know, recordable injury rates tend to focus our attention on low severity injuries more often than not.
And if we the more we obsess over that number and getting to 0 and whatnot, we're taking more and more of our focus away from the hazards and the things that matter the most. And I think that explains the trend of look, we've cut recordable injury rates in half in 17 years.
And made no progress in serious injuries and fatalities. So our obsession with recordables is done well in the minor types of injuries but not helped helped us make any progress on the serious stuff and you know, to kind of end this tirade, I go on about it.
You know, one of the things I ask board members often because they they have a lot of the control over what the company measures related to safety as I ask him, Mike, you're obsessed with recordable injury rate, but how many of those recordable injuries would you trade for one life?
Yeah.
And usually they're like it's quiet and they're treating me like I'm an academic asking a rhetorical question. But at higher orders of an organization, whether you're putting the sign of how many days since last recordable or giving people a bonus or not a bonus based on recordable injury rate.
Those decisions are really reflect the answer to the question. So people say, you know, I'd trade all the recordables for a fatality, then that's how we should be assigning our resources and what we should be paying attention to. So I think it's really at odds the the.
Counting of recordables and rewarding lack of Recordables is is hurting us in many ways, from learning to incentives to priority and everything in between.

Perley Brewer   20:24
Now one of the other topics you deal with in one of your chapters in the book is is safety walks and I guess my my question around that is if someone comes to you and asks that question, who should do them? How often should they do them?
And if it's senior management, how do you get to do it? Because generally speaking, they tend to delegate health and safety.

Matthew Ryan Hallowell   20:48
Yeah. Well, let me first start by I'll share with you the way that I distinguish a leadership engagement from a safety observation or a safety walk. So I think both are important leadership engagement is, generally speaking, somebody who.
Is in a position of influence in the organization, but generally not involved in the day-to-day work, right? So that could be seen some senior leader and they want to show visibility in the field. I think it's important to understand that generally these people, I say generally very carefully, don't really know the details and specifics.
Of the work, they're a visitor on site. They're real.
Objective should be to show the crew that they care about safety. They care about them and they're aligned with this prioritization of of really important things. If you have a senior leader who shows up on a job site and they're penny loafers and a shiny new hat and.
Has a gotcha moment with somebody you know, because their vest isn't all the way zipped up. It's not going to align well with the rest of the program, and everything starts to fall apart in a hurry and they look foolish. Frankly, so leadership engagement is an important.
Activity to do really well, but I would say it's very different from going out and doing an observation or an audit where you're looking for hazards and controls that really requires somebody, I think closer to the field, not necessarily a peer-to-peer observation, but somebody who knows what they're looking at and can and is that a kind of an elevated position of experience.
Experience to be able to say, well, these are the high energy hazards. These are the controls. This is what should be there, etcetera. And you know senior leaders have to deal with all sorts of different things. They can't know all that sort of stuff. So that really relies on somebody closer to the field. Now if they've got a time to go and engage with people, I think there's two things that you do in a safety walk you look.
At stuff and you talk to people and you got to do a healthy combination of both of those things, right? So what I would suggest people should be doing and I suggest in the book is look for the high energy in the direct control spend most of your time on that and then also spend some time understanding the context in which people work.
Because although it's nice for me to say make sure that the controls are immune to human error, right once they're installed and verified used properly, the reality is people design, install, and verify and use controls, so we need to make sure that people are in an environment where we can increase the chances that that will happen.
Reliably, and the things we know will decrease the chances of that are things we call them precursors, but they're things like are people rushed? Are they fatigued? Do are they, you know, potentially under trained. Are they inexperienced with a particular configuration?
You know, sometimes people who have been around a long time get too comfortable around hazards. These are all contextual factors that explain the likelihood that a control will be in place and used properly. I think a safety walk needs to also concentrate or maybe not concentrate, but also include those things.
Because otherwise we get into the kind of finger pointing towards the field, like you don't have a control. What's wrong with you? There's often a good explanation for when somebody made an error related to a control that relates to the situation that they're in and precursors give us some clues of things to go look at and talk about when we do visit the field.

Perley Brewer   24:14
So a big topic in health and safety in the last few years has been measuring and monitoring safety. You talk in your book about measuring and monitoring safety with high energy control assessments. Explain that to our listeners.

Matthew Ryan Hallowell   24:21
Yeah.
Yeah. So high energy control assessments are casually what we call Heka, I'd say. And I think I said exactly in the book like it's truly the crown jewel of energy based safety. And here's why most companies are.
Measuring lagging indicators still, so we talked about TRIR and triffer and these types of incident rate counts, whether it's dart or you know there's lots of different lagging indicators. I think people for a long time have wanted something different.
And so there's been this, this kind of commentary that, you know, don't measure leading indicator or don't measure lagging indicators, measure leading indicators and those are generally inputs to the system. The things you do to keep people safe.
A challenge with those leading indicators are good, but the challenge is that people do those safety activities so differently from company to company that their measures don't really allow us to compare companies to each other.
So whereas recordable injury and other lagging variables mean something, if you compare one company to another right in terms of at least they're measured generally the same way. If I'm measuring, say, observations and one company's, you know, calls observations, a peer-to-peer program, another one says it's a leadership engagement, right? There's a senior people.
Somebody else does something in between. We're not measuring apples to apples, so from a measurement standpoint, we've we've been, I think leading indicators been useful in a business, but they generally don't hold the same weight, say at board meetings and others where the organization needs to be able to say how they fit into the broader scheme across the industry.
And so, you know, another issue is that you know we when we look at measuring things, if we look at our lagging indicators, we wait have to wait until the work is done to measure how safe things were, right. And arguably we you know that those metrics don't really even reflect that leading indicators have somewhat tenuous relationship.
Outcomes over long periods, so you know, doing good things generally improves outcomes over the long term, but Heka high energy control assessments are a way to measure safety on an ongoing basis. So I actually would wouldn't say it's measuring, it's more monitoring safety.
So the way that it's designed is, you know, Perley, if you and I go visit a site and we do a safety safety observation, imagine some parallel universe where you and I know the work really well, right. I'm not saying you don't, but I don't for sure we don't. We know the work. Then we can go out and say, well, what are the high energy hazards that are present on the job today with this crew doing this task on this day?
Which how what proportion have direct controls and which don't, and we can actually measure that and that metric can be reduced to a number, but it also can be used to direct learning. So we could, you know we can measure that in high volume because we're doing safety observations regularly. We don't have to wait for a few incidents to get our insights.
We can base it on hundreds or thousands of observations that occur over time, and we're looking for our trends and, for example, which high energy hazards are we controlling well and which ones are we not? What tasks do those relate to? Which tasks are are are, you know, generally safe tasks and what tasks do we have a lot of exposure?
And so the metric carries a lot of learning behind it. And you know, I encourage the listeners go, you know, if you don't get the book, there's a there's a, there's a paper out there on high energy control assessments that explain, you know what it is, how to use it. We've got a lot of folks starting to use this, this method.
And it's what's cool about it is it's governed, meaning there's a one way to do it. There's a rule book and everything it's trademarked, so people can't just make 50 different versions of Hakka. And so that if companies do follow the rules and they do do the assessments the correct way.
And they can see, you know what they can help other companies with and teach people. And they can also see where their shortcomings are and what they might need to learn. And and that moves us forward more as a community. So that's a little hecka in a nutshell. It's really hecka talk all day about hecka, as you could probably tell.

Perley Brewer   28:30
Yeah.
In your book, you talk about the 10 steps for energy based system integration and 10 lessons learned but not going through all 10 obviously. But what are three things that you could think from the top of your head lessons that you've learned and or some of your clients have learned?
As they use this approach.

Matthew Ryan Hallowell   28:55
I'm glad you're not asking me to recite all 10 'cause. I don't think I'd remember them. Certainly not in order. Yeah, just a few kind of key things about.
About energy based safety, right. I would say the first, first and foremost, it's important to go slow with this. I don't mean like take a long time to start it, but I do mean it takes a while to plant these seeds to use an analogy and it you got to water them, you got to give it.
Nutrients. You got to give it sunlight and everything. So although this energy based safety concept is not a new activity helps you do what you're already doing better like pre job briefs and safety walks and leadership engagements and measuring so.
It helps you upgrade the system and make it sift focused and based on evidence, but Even so it takes time to really learn this and understand how to do it well. So where some organizations, sometimes people call me and they'll say, you know, I'm going to, I'm going to do energy based safety and I'm going to have it rolled out in the next six months.
Having worked with a couple 100 companies by now, I can say confidently it that will not work. It's going to take a lot more time and a lot more. You know coats of paint, if you will, to get it right. So I recommend you know, start with the energy wheel.
It's a very easy thing to incorporate into the organization. You know, it's it the the, the cost is related to training. It's not related to any sort of sophisticated system train people to use it. It's intuitive to the field. They tend to like, it makes their job easier.
Of recognizing hazards and it UPS the organization's IQ and energy and it gets people comfortable talking about safety as energy, which allows you to then later move into. All right, well, let's introduce high energy and sticky and controls and some of these other things.
So I think I wrapped up probably three of those recommendations into one response, but you know there we've learned a lot about how to integrate and and we've made a lot of mistakes, right. So a lot of companies, especially those who are.
You know, leading the way, if you will, trying new things had to do it, go back and do it again. That's a really common thing. And so I think we can learn those lessons maybe from some folks and not repeat some of the the same mistakes, maybe make some new ones and then share them, but.
Yeah, that would be. That would be what comes in a top of mind in terms of of some lessons learned for for folks, it takes a while to to do this well and it is a pretty big shift in the way that that safety activities are performed at the moment adds a little more formality, adds a little more strategy to the things you're already doing.

Perley Brewer   31:38
So my final question, several years ago, a student of mine who worked for a very large organization told me her pet peeve, as she put it, every time an organization introduces a new system, it is just another, as she put it, flavor of the week.

Matthew Ryan Hallowell   31:38
Yeah.

Perley Brewer   31:53
And it will be gone by the time staff finally get used to it. Is energy based safety just another flavor of the week? How would you answer her?

Matthew Ryan Hallowell   32:03
I hope not. You know, I I sympathize with with both the frontline who, who kind of get these flavors of a day of the day and and even also with with executives and board members who.
You know they it's flavor of the day for them too. We we introduce new things to them quite often being a little bit irreverent towards the past. I will say one of the mistakes that we've made that we need to own up to as a safety profession is we've done a lot of things a particular way because they sounded good.
You think about how we evaluate what the next initiative is going to be. You know, sometimes it's based on, hey, I that feels good to me or there's a good sales pitch behind it. Safety is I say, you know, relatively new to being a scientific field. You know, where the decisions we make and what we invest.
And where we go next is based in evidence and not, you know, trying to feel where the winds are blowing. So I would say, you know, I hope that this is different. I know that some people will perceive it probably to be a flavor of the day or maybe even a flavor of yesterday, right. If you look at it like, well, I've been doing the energy wheel.
Whatever. Like that's true, a lot of people have, but I think the thing that's different is that, you know, this is really based on a lot of evidence. It's not based on a consultant trying to sell a thing. And, you know, a lot of the material is Open Access. It's in.
Journals now I put the book together to make it more accessible for folks who have to go chasing around 100 journal papers.
And it's built by a large community of collaborators, so no one person owns it. I get to be the mouthpiece often, but it's not mine, right? It's not somebody else's. It's a whole community driven, evidence based process. So I think that's enough.
Difference from kind of the ways we've handled it in the past where I think that this has a a different future behind it and that's me being hopeful. Obviously I'm biased. So I won't say it will be a flavor of the day, but that's why I don't think it will be is that there's a lot more meat behind this thing.

Perley Brewer   34:12
Yeah.

Matthew Ryan Hallowell   34:14
Than than what we may be used to in some other programs.

Perley Brewer   34:18
Yeah, I agree with you 100%. I've been in health and safety for for 32 years and really evidence based safety is really new. There's been a lot of safety over the years programs because you know, as you put that, they feel good that they look good, they sound good, but not always a lot of.

Matthew Ryan Hallowell   34:29
Yes.

Perley Brewer   34:39
Real evaluation and behind them as such and or evidence, you might say. Actually one other question I'd like to ask you. You just come back from Australia. You mentioned that and we were talking before our podcast. What were you doing in Australia?

Matthew Ryan Hallowell   34:53
Well, so I I didn't speak too much about what I do here at the university, but Long story short I I started and I run a research alliance of it's over 120 companies and they collaborate with us directly in, in the research that we do.
So we bring the rigor, they bring the practicality in context. I helped when I was on sabbatical a couple years ago, I worked with a amazing colleague of mine, Helen Lingard, who's my counterpart in Melbourne at RMIT University, and.
She's very well connected to industry and so we talked about what would it look like to have a sister centre to the CSRARS here in Colorado that existed in Australia. And so I got a chance to go over with a few of my colleagues, a few professional members of of our group, Brad and Mike, who are founding chair in existing.
Chair of the the research lines and we got to participate in their very first summit. So what's cool is this evidence based collaborative type of community is is strengthening globally. And I think it's a new way of doing research.
And so it's really exciting to go over there and celebrate with them for a few days long trip, but worth it.

Perley Brewer   36:08
Great. Look, Doctor Hallowell, thank you very much for taking the time to be with us. We certainly enjoy talking to you every time we get the opportunity and we'll certainly continue to look forward to your book. By the way, for folks that would like to receive a copy of your book.
When it does become more available, how how do you suggest to get a copy?

Matthew Ryan Hallowell   36:31
Yeah. So just a couple of comments about the book. It went out of stock because I think this is a good problem to have, but it's it's still a problem. It went out of stock really quickly. It was only released a little over a week ago.
Just because the the demand was high, I've been told that it will be fully back in stock and well, they a week ago they said in a week in two weeks, so it should be anytime now. And yeah, please, please keep an eye out for it. Shouldn't be too long.
But but in the next couple of weeks, Amazon is a good place to get it. You can also go to the publishers website. They can. They can do that for you too. And one last thing I'd like to comment. I'd like to make about the book is something important to me is this was created from the input of hundreds of people who did research with us.
To create the knowledge and so the proceed, the author proceeds from the book are going into a scholarship fund that will help support the next generation of safety scientists. So students who want a book and developing countries that need a book, and it's too expensive.
Just say that so your listeners know if they go out and they buy a copy of it, proceeds aren't going to me. I'm not just out here Hawking books. The proceeds will go to charitable cause. So in the spirit of it being a community driven effort, it's a good thing for us to continue to give back. So no, you're getting a book and you're also giving back at the same time.

Perley Brewer   37:55
Excellent. Thank you very much again for our listeners. We are here every week on our podcast. Stay safe and have a good week. We'll talk to you next week.