Can’t remember if I’ve posted this already, but this open access paper systematically reviewed the literature on the efficacy of interventions in preventing work accidents, up to 2015.
100 studies met quality inclusion, representing 31 million pooled individuals in 59 interventions.
They found that “Strong evidence supports greater effects being achieved with safety interventions directed toward the group or organization level rather than individual behavior change”.
Not surprisingly, engineering controls were more effective at reducing injuries than other approaches.
Multifaceted interventions combining interventions particularly at the organisational level or across levels, provided moderate to strong evidence of efficacy.
Modest but possibly over short follow-up periods was found for safety climate interventions.
Behavioural approaches, including incentives, goal setting, feedback/ coaching, and safety training were found to be “less effective”.
Specifically, they stated “behavioral approaches have no or little effect on prevention of injuries at work”, with some limited evidence for training at medium term follow-up.
However, some limited but strong to medium effects of counselling was found.
For training, the weaker effect sizes found “does not mean that safety training is not relevant, but rather it is ineffective in the absence of other efforts”.
Supportive evidence was found towards legislation/regulation improving injuries, but with lower effect sizes. Enforcement was found to work more consistently. However, modest evidence for legislation may have “quite large” effects at the population level.
No effects were found for efficacy of physical training methods on reducing accidents at work.
Insufficient or limited evidence was found for the efficacy of safety campaigns, and “soft” regulation like audits and certification systems.
An extract of some of their tabulated data is shown below (one of dozens of pages of tabulated data).
The report is open access (freely available in full) and makes a great reference. I recommend checking it out.
Authors: Dyreborg, J., Lipscomb, H. J., Nielsen, K., Törner, M., Rasmussen, K., Frydendall, K. B., … & Kines, P. (2022). Safety interventions for the prevention of accidents at work: A systematic review. Campbell systematic reviews, 18(2), e1234.
Study link: https://doi.org/10.1002/cl2.1234
SafetyInsights.org 
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