Safety culture assessment process

The Safety Culture Maturity model is a participatative, solution-focused safety culture assessment and improvement method. What makes it different from other safety culture assessment processes is that it has a strong focus on solutions, involves a high degree of workforce participation, and provides an opportunity for... 

Establishing the status of the safety systems, controls, degree of management, and employee and union participation via means of risk assessment, and evaluating the physical risks in the woikplace, is a vital part of the safety culture shift process. This forms the foundation on which a positive safety culture is built. Risks in the workplace can only be managed once they have been assessed. Ongoing risk assessment is an important component of safety culture. 

Developing an objective approach to risk management is as much about the language we use as it is the processes we put in place. Those who have the authority to undertake a safety assessment have a responsibility to wield that power carefully and shrewdly and this can quickly be undermined when one resorts to emotive and reactive language. This is as true for the language of the safety case as it is in the corridor conversations with colleagues. Those who operate in CRM have a duty to propagate objectivity by example and to communicate in a way that drives a safety culture which is not rash but considered. 

Lagging and leading indicators provide little guidance to do with some of the more abstract management elements such as process safety culture and management review. This difficulty is entirely overcome when a management assessment approach is used. 

Simon expressed the view that the culture drives the behavior and that a culture change is required for success in behavior-based safety. A culture assessment (such as the Simon Open System Culture Change Model) measures the culture process and impacts on the whole of operations —the technology, tmst, leadership, symbols of the culture, et cetera. He also advised that before a behavior-based initiative is undertaken, management leadership must have been established. That s implicit. This factor cannot be overlooked. These are excerpts from Simon s paper titled The Culture Change Model of Behavioral Safety ... 

Advances in Patient Safety New Directions and Alternative Approaches is a four-volume set of 115 articles, which describe patient safety findings, investigative approaches, process analyses, lessons learned, and practical tools to prevent patients from being harmed. It includes articles by AHRQ-funded patient safety researchers on topics such as reporting systems, risk assessment, safety culture, medical simulation, health information technology, and medication safety (AHRQ Publication No. 08-0034). 

For additional details about this five-step assessment process (such as recommended survey questions and an outline for your assessment report), refer to McSween s book The Values-Based Safety Process Improving Your Safety Culture with a Behavioral Approach (1995). 

A safety audit report provides an assessment of the outcomes of the safety-related decisions made by management over the long term. Those outcomes are determined by evaluating the adequacy of what really takes place with respect to the application of existing safety policies, standards, procedmes, and operating processes. A safety audit report serves as the basis for improvement of an organization s safety culture. 

The Keil Centre has developed the Safety Culture Maturity concept into an assessment tool to measure ten key elements of Safety Culture Maturity . An interactive workshop process allows employees to identify current levels of Safety Culture Maturity and what needs to happen to move to the next level. 

The process to assess the safety culture is to determine the collective attitudes (perception) about safety. (Safety perception surveys are discussed in Chapter 17.) Confidential interviews are conducted with all levels of employees and management (see the discussion of independent reviews in Chapter 17). A strategic action plan model is developed where a new course is charted for instilling safety into the organization. The point is to design a new culture that is consistent with management and employees perception of the safety objectives [3]. 

Audit is an overview across the organisation of the entire risk management process. It should consider whether the objectives are sufficiently comprehensive to cover all hazards and their effects on all those persons (internal and external) who may be affected. It should include the objectives and management style of the directors and their influence on the safety culture of the organisation. It can use data from the review of performance to assess the strengths of the organisation and those aspects where improvement is necessary. 

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