The American National Standards Institute (ANSI) accredited the charter of the American National Standards Committee, Z490 Criteria for Accepted Practices in Safety, Health and Environmental Training, on April 1, 1998. This Standard grew out of the recognized need for improvement in safety, health, and environmental training. Quality training is required to ensure that workers and safety, health, and environmental professionals have the knowledge, skills, and abilities necessary to protect themselves and others in the workplace.
Four (4) years ago, April, 1996, the ASSE conducted focus group meetings across the country...two (2) in Houston, two (2) in Chicago, two (2) in Gaithersburg, MD, involving over a hundred training experts from business, industry, professional societies, trade associations, training providers, large and small operations. The purpose of the meetings was to learn if the ASSE should venture into accreditation of training organizations programs as well as ascertaining the market interest in procuring such accreditation. The Society hired an organization expert in facilitating these accreditation efforts. After much analysis, further discussion, and more debate, the consensus was to pursue an American National Standards training standards project.
The rationale offered ANSI in filing the application for establishing the project was that these safety, health, and environmental training standards would improve areas of competence, quality and effectiveness. Their objective is to develop standards of quality, which ensure that safety, and health-training providers meet such standards. The standards of Best Practice, now called Accepted Practice, can help employers and consumers of training services select quality safety and health training materials, instructors, and other program components. Once established, these standards can be used to audit, monitor, evaluate, analyze, etc. national, industry-wide training of large and small training service providers as well as for corporations and government entities seeking third-party review of their employee training activities. Adding weight to this rationale was the approval of the ANS Z390.1-1995 standard, Accepted Practices for H2S Training, where industry demonstrated its support for such training criteria. This validation presented convincing testimony to show that affected parties/interest groups would support these types of standards development.
The forty-five (45) day public review and comment period timeline, from 7/14/2000 to 8/28/00, established by ANSI policy is over. The Society is now beginning to go through the comments and put together responses. ASSE announced the standard in the following venues to solicit public comments on the draft standard:
As stated above, the comment period is over, which means that we cannot consider comments during this course of the standards development process. There will be a second public review period on any significant changes to the draft standard, and you will have the opportunity to comment about significant changes to the standard. There will be an announcement on the ASSE website and in ANSI Standards Action providing comment dates. We do want to point out that this second public review is for significant changes to the standard and the whole document will not be open for review. The Z490 Committee itself reviews the document and then ballots any changes before the second public review.