A personal essay on injury, blame, and building better tools for risk — and an introduction to who we are
Welcome
If this is your first time here, welcome. This blog is where we write about risk: how it's assessed, how it's talked about, and how organizations decide what to do about it. Some posts will be practical, walking through frameworks and methods. Others, like this one, will be personal, because for us the two are impossible to separate. The way we think about safety didn't come from a textbook first. It came from my hands.
So before we get into what we do, I want to tell you why we do it.
Third Degree
I got third degree frostbite cone picking in Northern Alberta in my 20s.
Not a mild case. Not something that healed up with a week of favoring my hands. Third degree, the kind that leaves permanent marks, on your skin and on how you think about risk for the rest of your life.
My employer didn't do what they should have done. My supervisor didn't do what they should have done. There were controls that could have prevented what happened to me, and they weren't in place. But at the time, they called it all my fault. I was "young and stupid."
That framing does something to a person. It tells you the problem was you, your judgment, your carelessness, and not the system you were working inside of. It took me a long time to understand that "young and stupid" wasn't an explanation. It was a way of not looking at the actual causes.
From injury to identity
For years afterward, I found myself doing something I didn't fully understand at the time: showing people pictures of my fingers and telling them what happened. Not out of self-pity. I think I was trying to make sense of it, and trying to make sure other people understood what could happen when the right controls weren't there.
When I was later thinking about what was next for me, my now-husband said: "You love showing people pictures of your fingers and talking about them. You should get into health and safety."
So I did.
That was a decade ago. And somewhere along the way, that experience shaped the way I think about risk now, not as an abstract professional subject, but as something I understand from the inside.
Not every risk deserves the same response
One of the hardest problems in safety work isn't identifying risk. It's deciding what to do about it, and doing that in a way that's defensible, consistent, and actually effective, rather than driven by whoever argues loudest in the room or whichever control happens to be cheapest.
Not every risk requires the same response. And not every dollar spent on risk reduction delivers the same level of protection. Those two sentences sound obvious once you say them out loud but most organizations don't actually make decisions that way, they default to whatever's familiar, whatever's cheap, or whatever's been done before. They do this regardless of whether the intervention will actually reduce harm.
That gap, between what feels like action and what actually protects people, is why we built our own AI-driven risk assessment tool: to bring more objectivity into how those decisions get made.
How the approach works
The approach is scenario-based. For a given hazard, we look at:
- What could happen: the range of realistic outcomes, not just the worst case or the most common one
- How often people may be exposed: frequency and duration of exposure to the hazard
- The potential consequences: severity if things go wrong
- The available controls: including their cost and the level of risk reduction they're actually expected to achieve
Putting those pieces together gives you something most risk conversations lack: a practical way to compare different risk treatments side by side, and the mindset to ask a more useful question:
Where will our investment make the biggest difference to people's safety?
Answering that means prioritizing controls that deliver meaningful risk reduction, while still recognizing when an expensive intervention may provide relatively little additional protection.
It's not about spending less. It's about spending where it matters most, where the dollars translate into fewer injuries, not just better optics.
Who's behind this with me
VirtuOHS isn't a one-person operation, even though this post is written in my voice.
James Pritchard is our co-founder and CTO, and he's the one who actually builds the tools I keep describing. When I talk about wanting a way to compare risk treatments objectively instead of by gut feel, James is who turns that into working software, so the tool fits the way safety work actually happens instead of forcing safety work to fit some generic platform.
Laura Jensen is our Director of Operations, and in practice, she runs the show. She leads day-to-day operations, connecting clients, strategy, and delivery to keep engagements moving from opportunity through completion, so the ideas in this blog don't just stay ideas. She's also an exceptional writer, and this blog is very much something we work on together, not something I write alone.
Between the three of us: the field experience, the software, and the operations that hold it together, that's VirtuOHS.
What we offer
That belief shows up in a few different ways in the work we do:
Gap Assessment. This is where most engagements start, and it comes before any recommendation or investment. We review your program against the health and safety legislation and standards that actually apply to you, then hand you a written, evidence-based assessment and a prioritized, itemized quote for whatever remediation is needed. You see the full picture before you commit to anything.
Health & safety services. Once a quote is accepted, we do the work it calls for. We build this with your people, not just for them, because your team knows the risks better than any binder ever would.
Fractional Safety Manager. For organizations that need ongoing safety leadership without a full-time hire, I take this on directly: building a structured program, integrating training, and growing the team's internal capability. Once the program is established, day-to-day ownership goes to your team, and I stay available for what falls outside it. The goal is internal capability, not dependency.
AI-driven risk assessment. This is the same scenario-based approach described above, built into something you can use directly. You bring the hazard, the exposure, and the controls you're weighing, and it helps you work through the comparison honestly instead of defaulting to whatever's familiar. It's available directly if you'd rather work through a risk decision yourself.
Free resources library. Practical materials, organized by province, industry, and category, to help strengthen a program on your own terms, whether or not we ever work together.
This blog. Alongside all of that, we write. Partly because good risk practice deserves better explanations than it usually gets, and partly because we think the field benefits from people being honest about where it comes from. You'll find posts here on methodology, on specific hazards, and on the harder, less comfortable parts of how safety actually works.
Where this leaves me
When the system fails someone, calling it their fault doesn't just get the story wrong. It stops the organization from ever looking at what actually needs to change.
Ten years in, that's still the work. Building better tools for assessing risk, yes. But underneath that, making sure that when something goes wrong, we ask what the system allowed to happen, instead of asking what was wrong with the person it happened to.
That's the thinking behind everything we build and everything we write here. If it resonates, stick around, we'll be publishing regularly. And if you've got a risk decision sitting in front of you right now, the tool is a good place to start.