Current Research - Safety and Health Management System Performance Measurement

After the Occupational Safety and Health Act was enacted in 1970, much attention was paid to accidental injuries throughout all industries. Yet, most of the safety and health systems for injury prevention are based on theoretical and qualitative analysis, which, although this may provide information for the safety manager to use in implementing the system, it does not provide verified and valid evidence of system performance. Traditionally, if incidents increased, interventional effort was increased by management; the intervention efforts decreased as the incidents decreased and this created an up and down performance. In addition, these changes have always been made subjectively. Thus, three reasonable questions are raised; first do the safety and health systems work? And, second, if they do work, to what extent to they work? And third, if the system works, how can we improve the system to reduce the incidents while saving the resources? For short, the three questions can be established as the main goal of this research and of almost all engineering categories, effectiveness and efficiency. On one hand, numerous organizations have been known to record the historical incident data for further analysis, motivational and incentive programs and for employee training cases. Also, with the improvement of hardware and software, to record, save and share data, it has become easier to derive and disseminate meaning from those data. But, unfortunately, until recently, most of the recorded data was based solely on the qualitative measures. With a lack of quantitative and statistical analysis, it is nearly impossible for the data or its analysis to adequately inform safety and health decision making.