Documents safety management 29 results

"The COVID-19 pandemic poses mankind again facing an ancient challenge, while this time in a scenario of unprecedented interconnectedness among people, businesses, and ecosystems. This distinctive feature of the 21st century is framed in this paper in terms of complexity, which has played a role in the rise, unfolding, and the hopeful end of the crisis. An exploratory analysis of the multifaceted influence of complexity across these three major stages of the pandemic is carried out, shedding light on emerging patterns that help to make sense of the crisis. The analysis of the unfolding crisis and the corresponding mitigation measures is based on five guidelines for coping with complexity developed on a previous study, namely: diversity of perspectives in decision-making, providing slack, giving visibility to processes and outcomes, understanding and monitoring the gap between work-as-imagined and work-as-done, and understanding and monitoring unintended consequences. Sources of data for that analysis encompass recent literature on the pandemic, complexity thinking applied to human factors and safety science, as well as general information on the pandemic publicly available from respected sources. For each of the three major pandemic stages, and for each guideline, a proposition for theory testing in future studies is set out."

"A country profile of the occupational health system is an important instrument for policy-making and programme development recommended by the WHO Global Plan of Action on Workers' Health and the ILO Promotional Framework for Occupational Safety and Health Convention. This document provides an overall picture of the current status of governance of workers' health in Germany, focusing on the national policy framework, priorities for action, objectives and targets, mechanisms for implementation, and human and financial resources for protecting and promoting workers' health.
Along with the current statistics on occupational accidents, occupational diseases and work-related health problems, preventive and compensative approaches to noncommunicable diseases related to the working environment (such as musculoskeletal, cardiovascular and mental disorders) are described. Lessons from the German occupational health system reported in this document will provide policymakers and their advisers in the WHO Member States with up-to-date guidance on good practice in the governance of workers' health to meet the challenges of the 21st century."

"The safety profession has grown and evolved over recent decades, and despite the prominence of the role within organisations, there is limited research about the current state of safety professional practice. The objective of a safety professional's role is often stated as ‘preventing incidents and harm to people', although the existing research fails to demonstrate a compelling link between safety professional practice and worker safety. More recently, a model of safety work in organisations proposed that safety activities fulfill broader social and political needs, in addition to the physical reduction of safety risk. In this paper, we report a study that investigated the underlying objectives of individual safety professional tasks, then performed thematic analysis to explore the contemporary role of safety professionals in organisations. 12 mid-level and senior-level safety professionals were interviewed at monthly intervals for six months regarding their work activities, in addition to an embedded researcher performing more than 240 h of field observations. Four categories of safety work in organisations – demonstrated, social, administrative, and physical – were used as priori themes to deductively analyze the data. The findings demonstrate strength of alignment between the safety professional role and line management, the increasing institutionalization of safety professional work, an absence of safety professional work directed at reducing safety risks to workers, and the lack of a clear connection between safety professional practice and safety science research."

"This article investigates safety-related developments in the Swedish mining industry over a 30-year period, from the 1980s to the 2010s. It studies what may have contributed to lowering the accident frequency rates and improvement of safety more broadly in the industry. On this basis, interviews were conducted with informants from mining companies. This material was supplemented with a workshop with mining health and safety representatives and documents relating to the subject. The results are divided into four main themes, showing that from the 1980s and onwards, lowered rates and general safety improvements followed in the wake of technology development. This was complemented by a more direct focus on organisational aspects of safety beginning in the early 2000s. Still the effectiveness of the individual measures is not clear; while they theoretically have an effect, causality is hard to show. In other words, the improvements may not necessarily depend on the specifics of these initiatives. Given this, the article discusses the different initiatives in-depth, and gives suggestions for future research and industry action. This includes recommendations for approaching safety holistically and the development of new proactive indicators."

"There have long been discussions on the professionality of occupational health and safety (OHS) and concerns about standards of practice, with the recognition of OHS as a profession further inhibited by lack of clarity on role and variations in terminology and principles underpinning practice. In 2013, the International Network of Safety and Health Practitioner Organisations (INSHPO) recognized the need for a global approach to reconceptualise OHS professionals as influential leaders who can work to integrate OHS within business processes. The Occupational Health and Safety Professional Capability Framework: A Global Framework for Practice was subsequently developed by this international body representing OHS professional associations across 10 countries with the outcome endorsed by 53 organisations at a ceremonial signing of the Singapore Accord. This paper reviews the development of the framework and the emergence of two clear roles; the OHS Professional and OHS Practitioner. It explores the process for clarifying the roles and required knowledge and skills together with the challenges experienced along the way. The paper recognises that the framework should not be a static document and so concludes by considering the work still to be done."