Bridging the Science Gap: 1% Safer Movement

It is Health and Safety Week in Canada and our serious incident rates are trending in the wrong direction. Indeed, Canada is a laggard when it comes to health and safety as compared to other OECD members.

The Canadian Society of Safety Engineers have stated that we have not made a dent in our fatality rates and the American Society of Safety Professionals have concluded that we need new paradigms to reduce serious incidents.

Safety is in crisis and industry is thrashing looking for answers. Science can provide these answers.

Mathilde Bourrier looked back over two decades of research into High Reliability Theory and found that “There is a wide gap between the level of knowledge published and debated in the academic circles on these issues and the level of knowledge transfer that has actually occurred from these circles to the industry or regulatory circles.”[1]

Over the last 40 years, social scientists have significantly advanced our understanding of incident causation, recognizing complex socio-technical and interorganizational interactions as the root causes of severe incidents [2]. Despite these insights, industry safety practices remain largely outdated, rooted in a 40-year-old paradigm that emphasizes compliance and individual blame.

Andrew Hopkins has pointed out that the implications of this theoretical debate extend beyond academia, affecting real-world accident prevention strategies[3]. This is underscored by alarming trends in workplace fatalities, as reported by the International Labour Organization: the rate of fatal incidents increased from one worker death every 15 seconds in 2013 to one every 10 seconds in 2019.

These statistics indicate a crisis in industrial safety, with prevailing practices reaching their limits of effectiveness. Industry needs results and is thrashing looking for answers. But there are significant barriers to achieving the success that the science delivers upon.

1.??? The safety consulting industry is a multibillion-dollar enterprise, entrenched in maintaining a status quo that often prioritizes profit over efficacy. Many solutions marketed are not grounded in rigorously vetted science but are sold through persuasive marketing and media that offer elusive promises of safety improvements, which are hard to implement but ensure continuous revenue flow.

2.??? The accessibility of scientific research poses another barrier. Understanding peer-reviewed papers requires a firm grasp of scientific methods, experimental design, and statistics. Moreover, most of these papers are behind paywalls and laden with academic jargon, making them inaccessible and unengaging for non-academics. This high standard of rigor is necessary to ensure reliability, but it also makes scientific findings challenging to translate into practical applications. Consequently, industry practitioners overwhelmingly default to system 1 thinking—relying on instinct and quick judgments without deep analysis which makes them easy prey with point 1 above [4].

Applied researchers/practitioners need to bridge this gap. We need to provide the critical thinking to sort the good research from the poor, we need to take the science and communicate it in a way that is consumable for industry with the ability to operationalize it within their organizations. We need to serve as intermediaries who can distill and disseminate scientific insights in a way that is actionable. This can be done through social media blogs, postings, and webinars. Further, use of open access publishing would help industry access research without the barrier of a paywall.

A significant step forward advocated by @Domin is to push for ethical standards that regulate the OSH scientist domain.” He suggests that before commercially marketing their products or services that they be vetted through the scientific arena. He suggests that “perhaps every manuscript should explicitly state whether it is a research or position paper, case study, review article, survey of technical paper.[5]”

If we are to improve safety performance applied researcher/practitioners have a vital role to play. We need to help non-academics make informed decisions with proven methodologies and data that significantly reduce workplace serious incident and fatality rates.

This article is written in recognition of Canada Health & Safety Week on behalf of the 1% Safer Movement

Robert B. Stewart BA, MSc, MBPsS – Occupational Psychology

Chief Science Officer Intactix Systems Inc.

Groupe-conseil Perrier One Percent Safer #workplacesafety

[1] Bourrier, M. (2011). The legacy of the high reliability organization project.?Journal of contingencies and crisis management,?19(1), 9-13.

[2] Wilpert, B., Fahlbruch, B. (1998). Safety Related Interventions in Inter-Organisational Fields, in: A. Hale, M. Baram (Eds), Safety Management – The Challenge of Change, Pergamon, Elsevier Science Ltd, Oxford, 1998, pp, 235-248.

[3] Hopkins, A. (2001), ‘Was Three Mile Island a ‘‘Normal Accident’’?’, Journal of Contingencies and Crisis Management, Volume 9, Number 2, pp. 65–72.

[4] Daniel, K. (2017).?Thinking, fast and slow.

[5] Cooper, M. D. "The emperor has no clothes: A critique of Safety-II."?Safety science?152 (2022): 105047.