Effectiveness of Occupational Safety and Health interventions: a long way to go.

Background: Occupational Safety and Health (OSH) has become an area of increasing concern for organizations and institutions. As it evolves, it has gradually posed ongoing challenges, becoming more complex, for organizations. Consequently, more comprehensive studies are required to advance academic and institutional research. From this perspective, this study aims to gather research contributions on the effectiveness of existing interventions for OSH improvement and identify areas for further exploration. Methods: According to the nature of scientific literature, the overall process of a literature review was investigated following an integrative approach, which involved searching for, selecting, and analyzing various literature in a creative and integrated manner, without a predefined structure. Results: The analysis suggests that there is room for improvement in understanding the effectiveness of OSH interventions and more concrete guidance is still desirable. Based on the literature, some research areas for future developments in OSH interventions are identified. One potential area to explore further is fostering human-centered technological development and a more conscious network of stakeholders, with higher coordination, shared knowledge, and open communication. Implications: Focusing on the proposed directions will support scholars and practitioners in pursuing continuous OSH improvement through more effective and well-grounded workplace interventions and encourage organizations to be proactive in daily OSH management.

The Transition from Occupational Safety and Health (OSH) Interventions to OSH Outcomes: An Empirical Analysis of Mechanisms and Contextual Factors within Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises.

Many Occupational Safety and Health (OSH) interventions have proven to be effective only under controlled conditions; during the implementation in practice, the interventions may not work as expected, especially in small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). SMEs are affected by different contextual factors than larger enterprises and these factors can influence the outcome of the OSH programs. Three different phases of an OSH intervention (design, implementation, and control) have been considered. The aim of this research is to understand what are the mechanisms by which an OSH intervention works or does not work as expected, together with barriers and drivers, and the related contextual factors. The research was designed following multiple case study research, which enables an in depth understanding of the intervention process and the identification of the most relevant factors for OSH. Data were collected through interviews with owner-managers or OSH managers of SMEs. Finally, the data were analysed through an analytical research framework that enabled the identification of the main mechanisms and contextual factors for the interventions that had an expected outcome and for those which had an unexpected outcome.

Developing, implementing and evaluating OSH interventions in SMEs: a pilot, exploratory study.

The literature on occupational safety and health (OSH) interventions contains many debates on how interventions should work, but far less attention has been paid to how they actually do work, and to the contextual factors that influence their implementation, development and effect. The need of improving the understanding of the OSH interventions issue is particularly relevant for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), since they experience worse OSH conditions, and have fewer physical, economic and organizational resources if compared to larger enterprises; thus, SMEs strongly need to focus their few resources in the decision-making process so as to select and put in place only the most proper interventions. This exploratory study is based on interviews with safety officers of 5 SMEs, and it gives an overview of the key features of the actual intervention process in SMEs and of the contextual factors making this actual intervention process similar or dissimilar to the ideal case. The results show how much qualitative and experience driven the actual intervention process is; they should be used to direct the future research towards an increasingly applicable one, to enable practitioners from SMEs to develop, implement and evaluate their OSH interventions in an "ideal" way.