Perception surveys, safety performance

More recently, safety people have applied leading, upstream, predictive, activity, preventive or process indicators or metrics to measure safety performance. This family of measures often includes safety audits, behavior-based safety measures, safety perception surveys, safety training, corrective actions completed, reductions in risk and risk factors, identifying safety and ergonomic opportunities, and other measures. Many use leading indicators to do the following ... 

The increased popularity of safety perception surveys in industry reflects an increased awareness of how perceptions impact safety performance. These surveys can help pinpoint issues that need attention and activities in need of an intervention. They also can be used to assess the person factors influenced by a particular intervention program. 

Even for the large organization with significant annual hours worked, in addition to historical data, hazard-specific and qualitative performance measures (safety audits, perception surveys, the incident... 

For example, I then wrote that since 1980, no articles had been published in the magazine Professional Safety that had performance measures or performance measurement in their titles or abstracts. A further search was made using effective and effectiveness as the key phrases. Two articles were found The June 1981 issue of the magazine contained How Do You Know Your Hazard Control Program Is Effective, written by Fred A. Manuele the February 1989 issue included Using Perception Surveys to Assess Safety System Effectiveness by Charles W. Bailey and Dan Petersen. 

By the long term effect we mean the safety performance over a long period of time coupled with prosperity on the basis of measures such as production, service, productivity and quality. Related to safety we would like to asess accidents and successful interventions together with a survey of risk perceptions in the organizations. If there is a problem to measure successful intervention, the level of accidents is the flip side and could be explored. 

Safety and risk management research in healthcare has adopted as its dominant trend the systems oriented approach, modelled largely on previous research in safely critical industries such as aviation and nuclear power. The systems view entails that the focus is not primarily on the mechanisms of individual human error but on the factors that shape human performance (Rasmussen 1986 Reason 1993,1997). In an organisational context, such factors are, of course, those that are within the control of the organisation. For instance, it has been suggested that quahty and safety are affected not only by operators professional and technical competence and skills, but also by their attitudes to and perceptions of their job roles, their organisation and management (Helmreich and Merritt 1998). Such employee attitudes and views are important elements which shape safety cirlture - and its related notion safety climate . Indeed, survey studies have shown that staff attitudes are important indices of safety performance not only in human-machine system domains such as railway operations and constmction (e.g. Itoh and Andersen 1999 Itoh et al. 2004 Silva et al. 2004) but also in healthcare (e.g. Colla et al. 2005 Itoh and Andersen 2010). 

Describe the uses of perception surveys for the purpose of measuring safety performance. 

What got done or didn t get done defines the pattern of expected performance within the organization, and that is a derivation of the organization s culture. Thus, a perception survey defines the reality of the organization s culture with respect to safety. 

The paper presents and discusses the results of this survey. Results illustrate that all organizations have been using safety management policies and their safety performance metrics are positive, however all have limitations. The non-proof of Hypothesis 2 (the relationship between the number of accidents and safety training) shows that the small size of the establishments has an impact on the perceptions of the employees. It also serves as an example that, in the future, a more expanded version of the questionnaire should be used in order to avoid similar shortcomings. 

Figure 18.7 These questionnaire items measure personal perception regarding the safety of an organization and were selected from the Safety Culture Survey developed by Safety Performance Solutions, Inc. With permission.

There was no explicit assessment of safety culture, in combination with a quantitative evaluation of the HSE environment in the accident reports. Such an assessment could be used to get a collective measure or temperarnre of the priority of safety in the organization, related to best practice . In Itho (2004) there is shown a correlation between the level of safety culture and quantitative incidents/acddents thus safety culture could be used as an indicator of the holes in harriers or the level of erosion of barriers, in combination with quantitative HSE data. A more specific measure tan culture is described by Rundmo (1997) i.e. when an employee in the Norwegian oil and gas industry feels at risk he/she is at risk. A proactive indicator could thus be a workplace survey, measuring risk perceptions or performing a more broadly based assessment of safety culture in combination with other local quantitative indicators such as gas emissions, injuries compared with best practice in the industry. 

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