SafetyInsights.org

This paper systematically reviewed evidence on the effectiveness of workplace interventions in improving safety culture (performance). 23 peer-reviewed studies met inclusion for review. Providing background, they note: ·        Safety Culture (SC) has many definitions and conceptualisations. One common definition is “shared values (i.e. what is important) and beliefs (i.e. how things work) that interact with an… Continue reading Evaluating the effectiveness of workplace interventions in improving safety culture: A systematic review

When you post a lot on LinkedIn, you’ll inevitably run into various criticisms, like biased research/methods/views. Confirmation bias, hindsight bias, outcome bias, overconfidence etc are also thrown around(which fair enough, we should apply critical lenses and thinking to research as with any part of our lives). Another that is used, albeit less frequently, is the… Continue reading Systematic review of evidence around the Hawthorne effect

This evaluated the quality of annual work health and safety (WHS) disclosures by the top 100 companies listed on the Australian Securities Exchange and with an aim to determine if a mandatory reporting framework would improve standards. Annual reports from the 100 companies over 2018-‘19 was included. First the author provides some background on metrics… Continue reading Evaluating the quality of WHS disclosures by ASX100 companies: Is mandatory WHS reporting necessary

Just read an interesting paper titled “How Not to Run an Incident Investigation” from Cassin and Barach (hard to resist such a title…) I’ve extracted two tables that may be of interest. Image 1 covers some perceived disparities between “assumptions of the investigation models” versus local rationality of work. For instance, an assumption could be… Continue reading Better incident investigations and local rationality

This studied perceptions of risk & links to behaviour of UK construction site dumpers and Subject Matter Experts (SMEs). 40 construction site dumper drivers and 7 SMEs ranked their perceived risk of various scenarios encountered during dumper operation. It’s argued that risk perception is a poorly specified hypothetical construct, where people can be cued into… Continue reading Risk Perception and Risk-Taking Behavior of Construction Site Dumper Drivers

This paper systematically reviewed the published evidence surrounding underreporting of worker injury and illness and the contributing factors. 20 studies met inclusion criteria from a larger sample. Predictably, numerous caveats and limitations were present in the quality of evidence and risk of bias. As always, read the paper for the full results. Results Overall the… Continue reading Underreporting of workers’ injuries or illnesses and contributing factors – a systematic review

A 2008 paper I read reviewed literature around perceived justice in incident reporting in organisations. They constructed the attached figure (image 1) to highlight proposed antecedents and consequences. For one, they note that organisational justice varies as a function of both formal attributes of decision-making as well as informal/social aspects of decision-making. For instance, “people… Continue reading The meaning of justice in safety incident reporting

This paper explored the impact of a new response to clinical incidents, which utilised a Restorative Just Culture (RJC) framework and Safety-II principles. Impacts were evaluated via staff surveys of perceptions of just culture and second victim experiences, quality of incident recommendations were compared before and after implementation and assessed via a healthcare hierarch of… Continue reading Restorative just culture significantly improves stakeholder inclusion, second victim experiences and quality of recommendations in incident responses

This paper systematically reviewed pertinent literature on leading indicators – discussing definitions, types, and development methods. Not a summary, but it’s open access. In image 1, they explore definitions, examples, functions, what, how, advantages and disadvantages of both leading and lagging based on the literature review. They also identify different typologies of leading indicators, including:… Continue reading Constructs of leading indicators: A synthesis of safety literature

This is an interesting study from `96 (from Torbjørn Rundmo, one of my favourite authors) which explored the relationship between risk perception and safety. 1,138 offshore oil employees self-completed a questionnaire. Specifically, the author determined: 1. whether risk perception affects risk behaviour or if risk perception and risk behaviour are independent effect variables, i.e. variables… Continue reading Associations between risk perception and safety