By Johnny Dyreborg, senior researcher, National Research Centre for the Working Environment, Denmark
Effective occupational safety prevention efforts should foster safer working environments, machines, tools, and working conditions rather than solely focusing on how workers can mitigate the risks.
Accidents at work are responsible for considerable morbidity and mortality, with an estimated 380,000 fatalities a year worldwide. Ambitious occupational safety and health (OSH) efforts with a focus on effective prevention in the workplace contributes to the fulfillment of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) 3 on good health and well-being, and SDG 8 on ensuring decent work and economic growth.
The Campbell systematic review that we have just published contributes to pointing out the most effective forms of safety prevention for accidents at work, which can provide some important prevention principles towards reaching these two important UN goals.
One good reason to think about more effective safety prevention measures is that the day-to-day efforts to prevent accidents at work are too often focused on measures directed at the personal or individual level (as opposed to the group or organisational level), which provides limited protection against having an accident. Even though effects are modest for legislation and enforcement, the population-based effects can potentially be quite large, as they are often applied to broader groups of workers.
In the process of doing this research, we sought to provide information that would allow informed decision making by stakeholders in allocating resources for safety prevention. Such information should be useful to business owners, leaders, worker representatives, OSH experts and organisations, authorities and policy makers.
As a researcher studying effects of safety intervention at work, and as the principal investigator of this systematic review, my hope is that this review can highlight which measures are more effective in reducing accidents at work, and thereby contribute towards reaching the United Nations SDG goals.
To reach relevant stakeholders, the transfer of research knowledge to practice is an important future activity, which should be concerned with how to share or disseminate research evidence with audiences that can use it to make decisions about their practice.
Overall, the results of this review support careful attention to the Public Health Hierarchy of Hazard Control when considering the most effective workplace safety interventions. This model, which shares public health and engineering safety principles, emphasises that more effective preventive measures involve eliminating risk at the source or separating workers from hazards. It is worthwhile noting that this fundamental principle is laid down in a number of guidelines and national and international OSH legislation, including the European Framework Directive on Safety and Health at Work.
Efforts delivered at the level of the group or organisation are more likely to be effective than individual level measures.
What works?
A focus on training workers to deal with dangerous tasks, for example, use of personal protective equipment, should be a last resort, exercised by itself only when other more effective measures are not feasible. However, it should be recognised that our review results show that such efforts enacted alone are unlikely to effectively prevent injuries.
In short, occupational safety intervention efforts should foster safer working environments through designing and planning safer tools, machines, and working conditions rather than focusing solely on how workers can mitigate the risks.
The systematic review is published in the open access journal Campbell Systematic Reviews.
Dyreborg, J., Lipscomb, H. J., Nielsen, K., Törner, M., Rasmussen, K., Frydendall, K. B., Bay, H., Gensby, U., Bengtsen, E., Guldenmund, F., & Kines, P. (2022). Safety interventions for the prevention of accidents at work: A systematic review. Campbell Systematic Reviews, 18, e1234. https://doi.org/10.1002/cl2.1234