FOSTERING A SAFETY CULTURE

Preview This section discusses approaches to establishing and promoting a strong safety culture among those people who are working under your supervision or leadership. 

Autumn Burton, a student severely burned during a laboratory 

A high school teacher, carrying out a chemistry demonstration, was using methanol with some chemical salts when a sudden explosion occurred that burned several students in the front row. Three students received serious burns to their faces, necks, arms, hands, and legs. The other students in the classroom ran from the room. Media reported that there was a lack of safety oversight that is common in many schools and inspections are rare. 

What lessons can be learned from this incident  

The most important thing that you must do is to establish and promote a strong, enthusiastic, vibrant safety culture. This chapter provides some information about how you might build a safety culture. 

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The Basic Safety Standards [2] state that the regulatory body should require that all parties develop a safety culture, which establishes that, as an overriding priority, radiation safety issues receive the attention warranted by their significance. This requirement for fostering a safety culture also applies to the regulatory body, since the regulatory body and its staff are essential... 

Despite Soviet officials efforts to promote scientific food systems as the ideal means to guarantee food quality and healthfulness, many consumers viewed industrially produced foods and public food facilities with suspicion. Soviet customers voiced their dissatisfaction with the appearance of industrially produced foods and complained about finding insects and pieces of debris in their foods.Rothstein and Rothstein write that the overwhelming majority of cafeterias were places where food supplies were limited and the food was of low quality and inexpertly prepared, where chaos, flies, dirt, and terrible service reigned (Rothstein and Rothstein 1997 183). Both the state s emphasis on food safety and its inability to maintain these standards fostered a widespread cultural awareness about food quality that has continued into the post-Soviet period (see also Dunn 2008 Jung 2009). 

A safety culture is created through trust, knowledge, and well-designed interventions to produce desired effects. The role of the leader is to be active in fostering these characteristics inside the organization as well as in the organization s social context. 

A strong safety culture is supported and sustained by the maintenance organizational structure. Every country and the utilities within that country organize maintenance in a fashion that best suits their particular needs. Whatever design structure is used, the following key factors should be incorporated to foster the safety culture of the plant ... 

It can t all be about rules, though, when it comes to a safety culture. You do need to mix in some recognition of the behaviors that you want in your workplace. For example, someone who helps another coworker lift a heavy item. That is refiective of a good safety crdture. That is the tj e of behavior you want to foster in your workplace. So, recognize those— have your supervisors recognize those behaviors. It doesn t have to be an elaborate celebration, either but if you can get employees doing these things, eventually it will carry over into your culture. 

As discussed earlier in this chapter, the main requirements to ensure an appropriate safety culture are similar to those which are advocated in quality management systems. These include active participation by the workforce in error and safety management initiatives, a blame-free culture which fosters the free flow of information, and an explicit policy which ensures that safety considerations will always be primary. In addition both operations and management staff need feedback which indicates that participation in error reduction programs has a real impact on the way in which the plant is operated and systems are designed. 

Safety experts in aviation often refer to the notion of a Just Culture - a way of safety thinking that promotes a questioning attitude, is resistant to complacency, is committed to excellence, and fosters both personal accountability and corporate... 

A.22. Management. The management s involvement in the facility and its effectiveness in paying appropriate attention to operational issues, including abnormal events, should be evaluated. In inspections it should be considered whether the organizational structure is suitable whether there are adequate numbers of staff how well management and staff communicate and how the management emphasizes the importance of safety and fosters safety culture. 

Both the VA and Jonkoping have clearly approached the improvement of safety and quality with great integrity, strength of purpose and seriousness. Both have leaders, at all levels, committed to improvement, who have fostered a culture of aspiration and continuous improvement. Both systems have invested heavily in educating and training their staff in safety and quality improvement... 

Enlightened safety leaders understand the value of creating and fostering a strong safety culture within their organization. 

In conclusion, this chapter demonstrates that the IRT approach can provide additional insights to psychometric properties of the HSOPSC. Both, the classical and modem approaches, are needed to form a complete picture of the properties of a set of items. Understanding the basic principles of IRT will hopefully foster its use more widely within the field of patient safety culture assessment. This will ultimately enhance our ability to measure this important constmct accurately. 

Creating a climate (culture) that actively fosters meaningful employee participation in the entire safety program... 

With an effective safety culture, supervision means correcting safety issues before punishing an employee. When the relationship between employees and management is open and interactive via employee participation, safety issues are discussed and solutions are mutually agreed upon. There is buy-in into the process. This type of relationship fosters a safe work environment and changes in culture where the need for disciplinary action is not needed. When discipline is needed, the parties are more likely to perceive it as corrective rather than punitive [2]. 

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