Safety culture

Safety culture is the collection of the beliefs, perceptions and values that employees share in relation to risks within an organization, such as a workplace or community. Safety culture is a part of organizational culture, and has been described in a variety of ways; notably the National Academies of Science and the Association of Land Grant and Public Universities have published summaries on this topic in 2014 and 2016 . Studies have found that workplace related disasters are a result of a breakdown in an organization's policies and procedures that were established to deal with safety, and that the breakdown flows from inadequate attention being paid to safety issues. A good safety culture can be promoted by senior management commitment to safety, realistic practices for handling hazards, continuous organisational learning, and care and concern for hazards shared across the workforce. Beyond organisational learning, individual training forms the foundation from which to build a systemic safety culture. The Chernobyl disaster highlighted the importance of safety culture and the effect of managerial and human factors on safety performance. The term ‘safety culture’ was first used in INSAG's (1986) ‘Summary Report on the Post-Accident Review Meeting on the Chernobyl Accident’ where safety culture was described as: "That assembly of characteristics and attitudes in organizations and individuals which establishes that, as an overriding priority, nuclear plant safety issues receive the attention warranted by their significance." Since then, a number of definitions of safety culture have been published. The U.K. Health and Safety Commission developed one of the most commonly used definitions of safety culture: "The product of individual and group values, attitudes, perceptions, competencies, and patterns of behaviour that determine the commitment to, and the style and proficiency of, an organisation’s health and safety management".