The effectiveness of 48 safety interventions according to safety professionals

Abstract

In The Netherlands, approximately 2.300 workers have a serious reportable accident at work every year, of which around 60 are fatal (Bellamy et al., 2014). Safety professionals employ many methods to improve safety for workers within their companies. Interventions might, for example, be aimed at improving companies’ overall ‘safety culture’, at the introduction of a safety management system (e.g. Robson et al., 2007), or at improving the compliance of workers to specific safety rules (e.g. Peuscher and Groeneweg 2012; Bryden et al., 2016). The effectiveness of many of those interventions remains however largely unclear (Dyreborg et al, 2015). The Dutch National Institute for Public Health and the Environment (RIVM) has started a project with the ultimate goal of developing a database filled with ‘effective safety interventions’. The interventions can be submitted by their developers using a fixed protocol. To support this project, a survey was developed, which was sent to all members of the Dutch Society for Safety Science (NVVK). In the survey, a list of 48 predefined descriptions of common interventions was used. Respondents indicated whether they made use of these common interventions and the extent to which they considered these effective. The survey thus provided an extensive overview of the use and perceived effectiveness of 48 specific safety interventions. In the near future, these insights can support the development and testing of more effective safety interventions.