The "Transparency for Safety" Triangle: Developing a Smart Transparency Framework to Achieve a Safety Learning Community.

Transparency about health and safety risks is a complex societal, moral, ethical and political concept. Full transparency does not come natural for any of the key stakeholder groups: organizations, authorities and the people. If safety information is not sufficiently shared between them, people and the environment can be harmed. The authors explored the literature on transparency in sharing health and safety information. The findings show that such transparency as a subject is abundant in the literature but the exchange of information is far from complete in practice. Health and safety information is shared both via internal flows within each stakeholder group and via external flows between them. All three main stakeholders in pursuit of true safety for their own reasons, building trust via sharing of health and safety information, require improvement in transparency and a safety information broker between them. This constitutes a smart transparency and information exchange framework. The authors recommend developing a transparency standard, to study cyber-socio-technical systems safety and to include currently underutilized experiential knowledge available from the general public in the societal discourse. The authors propose a societal domain extension to a holistic safety culture model in support of a learning safety community.

What about Using Photovoice for Health and Safety?

The positive reception of Wang and Burris' photovoice method, published in 1997, has led to a proliferation of ways in which professionals deploy photovoice in a widening range of application fields, e.g., public health, social development and phenomenological research of human experiences. A scoping review method is used to obtain an overview of current photovoice designs and of application examples in the health and safety domain. The results show a variety of method designs. Our findings indicate that all of the photovoice designs are composed from different combinations of eleven process steps. Five generic objectives cover the range of application examples found in our literature study. We therefore condensed the variety into five generic photovoice designs for: (a) communication, (b) education, (c) exploration, (d) awareness, and (e) empowerment purposes. We propose this for use in a classification system. The potential for application of these photovoice designs in safety management is illustrated by the existence of various safety related application examples. We argue that the five generic designs will facilitate the implementation and usage of photovoice as a tool. We recommend that both a theoretical framework and guidance are further developed. We conclude that photovoice holds potential for application in health and safety management.

Involving Moral and Ethical Principles in Safety Management Systems.

Some organisations, and some individual humans, violate moral and ethical rules, whether or not they are written down in laws or codes of conduct. Corporate transgressions, as this behaviour is called, occur because of the actions of those in charge, usually bright and dedicated people. Immoral and unethical conduct can adversely affect the safety of workers, the general public and the environment. A scoping review method for a literature search is used to explore morality and ethics in relation to health and safety management. Our findings show that controlling the risks associated with misconduct and corporate transgression is not usually seen as a responsibility allocated to safety systems but is left to general management and corporate governance. The moral and ethical principles, however, can be applied in safety management systems to prevent misconduct and transgression-related safety risks. Our results show that ethical leadership, ethical behaviour, sustaining an ethical climate and implementation of an ethical decision-making process emerge as key preventive measures. The discussion presents a proposed way to include these measures in safety management systems. Conclusion and recommendations underline that unwanted behaviour and transgression risks can be brought under control, starting from a set of best practices. Not only the managers themselves but also board members, independent external supervisors and government regulators need to embrace these practices.

Reflecting on the safety zoo: Developing an integrated pandemics barrier model using early lessons from the Covid-19 pandemic.

Our current predicament, the Covid-19 pandemic is first of all a health crisis. However, social disruption and economic damage are becoming visible some 7 months after the Wuhan City outbreak early December 2019. The authors wondered what could have been done better in prevention and repression of the Covid-19 pandemic from a safety management and risk control point of view. Within a case study framework, the authors gathered literature on pandemics, about country response effectiveness, and about human behaviour in the face of danger. The results consist of a safety management oriented narrative about the current pandemic, several critical observations about the current paradigms and shortcomings of preparation, and a number of opportunities for improvements of countermeasures. Many of the proverbial animals in the safety zoo, representing typical behaviours, were observed in action. Based on well proven risk analysis methods - risk management, event tree, scenarios, bowtie - the authors then analyse the generic sequence of events in a pandemic, starting from root causes, through prevention, via the outbreak of a pathogen, through mitigation to long term effects. Based on this analysis the authors propose an integrated pandemics barrier model. In this model the core is a generic pandemic scenario that is distinguishing five risk controllable sequential steps before an outbreak. The authors contend that the prevention of pandemics via safety management based biohazard risk control is both possible and of paramount importance since it can stop pandemic scenarios altogether even before an outbreak.

Improving Education and Training of Dutch Major Hazard Control Inspectors: A 15 Years Longitudinal Case Study.

The education and training program for inspectors of Major Accident Hazard Establishments, specifically the EC Seveso III directive implicated Dutch chemical companies, changed considerably over a fifteen year period. This longitudinal, time-series cross sectional case study describes the development of the education and training program for Major Hazard Control inspectors, acting as regulators from the Labour inspectorate, belonging to the Dutch Ministry of Social Affairs and Employment. A blueprint had to be constructed in order to assess the development and quality of this program in four cross sections over time. The description highlights both the safety related content and the regulator skills parts of the program in its changing context. Professional standards, educational objectives, quality of education, evaluation method, education change process and the response to the dynamic operational environment were examined. The main findings are that the education and training program kept the same main structure over the time period while its contents were adapted to respond to external context changes. Internal evaluation of performance data and education style led to a shift in contents from theoretical knowledge towards safety management and inspection practice oriented experience related knowledge. An active teaching style, increased usage of professional standards and more systematic evaluation, starting from the blue print in this study, offer the best opportunities for further improvement. Current insights on regulatory performance lead to a recommended future perspective for the inspectors' role to be translated into education and training: balancing empathy, inquisitiveness and support with control and enforcement, or rather: exert tough love, staying between too soft and too hard.

Language issues, an underestimated danger in major hazard control?

Language issues are problems with communication via speech, signs, gestures or their written equivalents. They may result from poor reading and writing skills, a mix of foreign languages and other circumstances. Language issues are not picked up as a safety risk on the shop floor by current safety management systems. These safety risks need to be identified, acknowledged, quantified and prioritized in order to allow risk reducing measures to be taken. This study investigates the nature of language issues related danger in literature, by experiment and by a survey among the Seveso II companies in the Netherlands. Based on human error frequencies, and on the contents of accident investigation reports, the risks associated with language issues were ranked. Accident investigation method causal factor categories were found not to be sufficiently representative for the type and magnitude of these risks. Readability of safety related documents used by the companies was investigated and found to be poor in many cases. Interviews among regulators and a survey among Seveso II companies were used to identify the gap between the language issue related dangers found in literature and current best practices. This study demonstrates by means of triangulation with different investigative methods that language issue related risks are indeed underestimated. A recommended coarse of action in order to arrive at appropriate measures is presented.