When you were little, your parents probably told you not to play with matches, and to look both ways before you cross the street. (My mother still warns me to not mix ammonia and bleach when cleaning my home in Indianapolis.) So when you got your first summer job—maybe as a dishwasher, a cashier, construction helper, or lifeguard—you were told all you need to know about staying healthy and safe at work, right?

Of course not. We don’t prepare kids to protect themselves at work. In fact, as a society, we pretty much do nothing—we send teenagers off to their first jobs with hardly a word about how to recognize hazards, what to do in an emergency, or who to go to if they feel unsafe. SAFETY MATTERS Predictably, this lack of preparation has contributed to needless suffering for thousands of young people and their families. Every year, nearly 60,000 kids under the age of 18 are sent to the emergency room for job-related injuries, and around 40 of these young workers die on the job. 

We can’t have teenagers die at work. To fight this, AIHA has partnered with NIOSH to develop a training module called Safety Matters. Safety Matters is designed to raise awareness among teen workers about staying healthy and safe at work through learning to identify hazards in real-world situations, stories from teens injured at work, and interactive group discussions. The module takes only one hour to deliver, so it’s perfect for use by AIHA members, many of whom are already connected to students and schools in their local areas. Now we have a ready-made, professionally designed module that we can present to any group of young people—from a ninth-grade health or shop class to a local scout troop.

Safety Matters is based on a more robust NIOSH curriculum called “Talking Safety,” which is delivered over multiple interactive sessions. Safety Matters distills the lessons presented in Talking Safety into a shorter format, and even has a component on what it means to be an IH.