A tale of two safeties

Over the course of the last year, I have attended a number of conferences and meetings where the subject of the current status and future of occupational safety and health (OSH) has been discussed and debated. The most recent of these was the International Conference on Occupational Health (ICOH 2018) held in May 2018 in Dublin. Earlier, in October 2017, I presented a paper at the 9th International Conference on the Prevention of Accidents at Work (WOS 2017) in Prague. Sandwiched between these two conferences were a number of other meetings and presentations, the most recent of which was the IOSH East Midlands Branch in Nottingham in April this year. All three events involved a mixture of academics and practitioners with a majority of the latter, not surprisingly, at the Branch meeting. Aside from enthusiasm and excitement surrounding a range of OSH issues, some of them new and some well-established, I also came away with a set of other impressions which made me think more about what had taken place in venues as diverse as Dublin, Prague and Nottingham. Some of these pick up on issues which I have written about in PPHS before (Volume 14, Issue 2, pages 97–98), such as the gap between research and practice in OSH. Much of the debate at the conferences, for example, could be characterized by what one conference participant characterized as ‘the academics talking among themselves’, the implication being that very little effort was made to reach out to practitioners and people from industry and involve them in the discussions. By contrast, the IOSH Branch event was characterized by some interesting discussions which were primarily driven by OSH managers with inputs from the academics in the audience. Finding the right balance in terms of topics and participation is probably very difficult in OSH, but I certainly hope that PPHS can go some way towards moving in this direction in the next few years.

Another impression drawn from the last 12 months is that much of the focus among academics is on the high-hazard industries (e.g. nuclear transportation and chemical sectors). Although there were some conference presentations which covered low-hazard, high frequency of accident industries such as construction, many of the discussions, particularly those centred on theory, had very little to say about what might be characterized as the everyday world of workplace safety. One thought that occurred to me more than once was that I was not sure what the practitioners in the audience would get out of, or take home from, the types of debates regularly staged at conferences (e.g. the nature of safety culture, the relationship between high reliability organizations and normal accident theory). A compounding problem is that these topics nearly always aimed involve large organizations. Another though that crossed my mind therefore was, what about the small and medium-sized companies? Although there is a growing body of literature in OSH in SMEs (e.g. Legg et al., 2015; Pinder et al., 2016), it still feels like a ‘blind spot’ among the research community and one where the evidence base is sometimes patchy (e.g. what types of successful OSH interventions in a large company might transfer to SMEs?). An additional goal for the future is therefore that new theories of safety take into account the very different contexts and constraints that shape and form the practice of OSH. Some of this will need to pick up on the work of pioneers in the field such as James Reason and Jens Rasmussen, but also to drill down further into the trade-offs involved in what one recent author calls the process of ‘Navigating Safety’ in organizations, be they large or small (Amalberti, 2013). I certainly hope that as I enter the third year of editing PPHS that we can try to include more papers on these and other topics which are key to the future development of OSH.

The papers in this issue

This edition of PPHS contains seven papers. The first four papers make up ‘regular’ papers in the journal, whereas the final three are collected together in a special section and focus on shift work and occupational cancer. Van Eerd et al. point to the fact many OSH personnel (‘knowledge users’ as termed in the paper) actively make use of research findings in order to provide advice and guidance in carrying out their work. Some of the barriers to the uptake and use of OSH knowledge include lack of time and resources, but also crucially the accessibility and credibility of the source of knowledge, play a role in how well new research is applied and adapted in the workplace. Van Eerd et al.’s paper is a good companion piece to other work in the area of research-practice gaps and efforts to improve the usability of research findings. Daniels et al. focus on the area of the design of jobs, an area of research which has been a longstanding preoccupation within organizational psychology and human factors/ergonomics over the years. The paper focuses on sets of job characteristics (e.g. job control, social support) which are well established in the literature and have been consistently linked to good outcomes for employee well-being and company productivity (Parker & Ohly, 2008). An important conclusion from the studies they describe is that job redesign interventions need to be closely aligned with employment practices in order to ensure that they are effective and sustainable, particularly where interventions are aimed at enhancing employee well-being. The paper from Van den Heuvel et al. focuses on methodology and the question of what types of data and other evidence (quantitative, qualitative) are most likely to be useful to policymakers. They conclude that relying exclusively on quantitative data may be misleading as the data may in some case be unreliable. In order to overcome these problems, Van den Heuvel et al. argue that a more pragmatic and inclusive approach to the assessment of evidence is needed, in particular an approach which includes both quantitative and qualitative elements. The final paper in the regular section of the journal, Margaryan et al., concerns the development of a tool to assist organizational learning following accidents and incidents. Much has been written in the past about learning, or lack of learning, following accidents (e.g. Kletz, 2001; Reason, 1997), however, rather less has been available in the form of a practical tool. The components of the tool (a process model, framework, questionnaire, guidelines and a series of engagement exercises) were tested and validated in a set of case studies and provide broad support for its validity and utility within OSH environments. To my mind, we need more of these types of translation exercises which operationalize theory and transform it into practice.

The final three papers in this edition focus on the outcomes from a review commissioned by IOSH and undertaken by researchers based at the Institute of Occupational Medicine and Herriot-Watt University in the United Kingdom. McElvenny et al. present the results of a systematic review of the epidemiological evidence suggesting a link between shift work and the incidence of occupational cancer. Crawford et al. present a similar review, but this time focusing on the relationship between mechanistic (e.g. lighting at work, psychological stress) and other health and safety factors related to shift work and cancer. Finally, Cherrie et al. combines the evidence from the two other studies in order to provide a summary for practitioners, part of which is achieved through the use of an infographic summarizing the available evidence on the risk of breast cancer from night work, and recommendations for action by employers. What emerges from all three papers is a complex picture which demonstrates the difficulties involved in establishing causal links between night shift work, for example, and the development of cancer. Aside from the three papers in this issue, further detail of this work, including the final project report, is available from the IOSH website.^1,2 This edition of PPHS concludes with a review of Carl Macrae’s book ‘Close Calls: Managing Risk and Resilience in Airline Flight Safety’. I would like to thank the book reviewer (Professor Timothy Vogus) for the time and effort he took to review this important contribution to our understanding of safety.

Notes

Notes

1 https://www.iosh.co.uk/News/Does-shift-work-cause-occupational-cancer.aspx

2 https://www.iosh.co.uk/Books-and-resources/A-review-of-the-impact-of-shift-work-on-occupational-cancer.aspx