Different strategies to prevent occupational accidents

Occupational health and safety

Occupational safety is the prevention of accident hazards and work-related health hazards to protect against work-related injuries (occupational accidents) and work-related illnesses. At the same time, occupational safety includes the humane design of work and the continuous improvement of work so that working conditions are constantly adapted to the physical and mental condition of people (Bundesanstalt fu?r Arbeitsschutz und Arbeitsmedizin, 2013). Over the years, strategies have been developed to counteract the risks associated with the various root-causes of accidents.

Strategies against technical causes of accidents

In the area of technical causes of accidents, attempts were made early on to improve safety and prevent accidents by standardising technology and having plants monitored by external experts. In Germany, for example, the Baden Society for the Supervision of Steam Boilers was founded in 1866. The reason for this was a disastrous fatal accident in a brewery in Mannheim. In England, the "Association for the Prevention of Steam Boiler Explosions" was founded as early as 1855, which provided its members with experts to examine the boilers (Ueko?tter, 2013).

What were initially small local technical monitoring associations have in some cases become larger groups that take over state tasks and advise companies worldwide on technical security and other topics. TU?V Rheinland, for example, today has about 20,000 employees in 50 countries and generates an annual turnover of about 2.2 billion EUR (TU?V Rheinland, 2023).

At the same time, a system of standardisation was developed, which is used all over the world today. While individual states and communities of states issue directives and laws that determine how safe machines must be built, a system of standardisation underpins the definition of the state of the art. As early as 1973, the European Community issued the first directive on the safe design of machinery. This directive was adapted in 2006 and revised as a regulation in 2023 (Europa?ische Union, 2023). In different legal areas there are different regulations with different requirements for the risk analysis, validation and marking of the products which are launched on the market. In China, for example, the CCC label applies, while in the United Kingdom the UKCA label must be used. In the European Union, the CE marking is affixed to products to indicate that the product complies with all European Union directives. In the United States, there is no general mandatory mark, but manufacturers can use the UL mark if they have their product tested by UL Solutions also known as “Underwriter Laboratories” (UL Solutions, 2023). In figure 4 the different regulation marks are shown as they are used by the different legal areas.

However, as the technical causes of accidents only account for a small part of the total number of accidents (Bo?rdlein, 2015; Bundesministerium fu?r Digitales und Verkehr, 2022), the focus of legislators and those responsible is shifting to the area of organisational and personal causes of accidents.

Strategies against organisational causes of accidents

Since humans have limited strength, limited resources and limited information- processing capacity, they have had to form organisations to accomplish more complex tasks, such as hunting big animal or producing a car. They therefore try to perform more complex and extensive tasks together and proceed in a division of labour. Due to human stubbornness and because of information deficits, there is inevitably a need for coordination (Ringlstetter, 2014).

As early as 1776, Adam Smith wrote his foundational work "The Wealth of Nations", in which he described the necessity of the division of labour to increase efficiency. “It is the great multiplication of the productions of all the different arts, in consequence of the division of labour, which occasions, in a well-governed society, that universal opulence which extends itself to the lowest ranks of the people.” (Smith, 1776, p. 22)

Since the human being alone is not only overburdened with regard to the work activity, but also with regard to the organisation of occupational health and safety, occupational health and safety must be organised in the same way as the work performance itself. For example, it would not be possible for an employee in a large company to carry out all the work in occupational safety and health alone, such as drawing up risk assessments, testing machines and equipment, instructing employees, carrying out medical check-ups, drawing up operating instructions, providing first aid in all areas and so on.

Legislators and industry have also recognised that laws and regulations are needed to organise occupational safety and raise it to a certain level of performance (Bundesregierung, 2023a; United Kingdom Government, 2023). In particular, the laws require the employer to regulate all occupational health and safety matters and, if necessary, to entrust employees with tasks in a documented manner if he does not carry out the tasks himself. It is also explicitly pointed out that the employer has to ensure a suitable organisation, provide the appropriate resources and point out to the employees their duties to cooperate (Bundesregierung, 2023a). In order to improve the organisation of occupational safety and health, different management systems have been developed over time, some of which are country-specific and some sector-specific. In recent years, international standards have been increasingly used to make the organisation of occupational safety and health comparable and measurable (Wo?ll and Suli?kova?, 2022b).

There are different certifications of enterprises that check internal or by external independent experts if the company runs an efficient safety management system. Some of the programs with their different intentions are shown in table 2. Today, passed certification in the field of occupational safety is a prerequisite for acceptance as a service provider in certain companies in many sectors such as the energy industry or the chemical industry. Numerous companies, from the manufacturing industry to the service sector, therefore verify through an independent third party whether they comply with the standardised specifications of management systems. It is the task of certification bodies for management systems to provide this confirmation of the audit (BSI British Standard, 2007; NEN, 2017; DIN Deutsches Institut fu?r Normung e. V., 2018; Verband akkreditierter Zertifizierungsgesellschaften e.V., 2021; Berufsgenossenschaft der Bauwirtschaft, 2015).

What can be determined, however, is that the quality of the organisation of occupational safety and health varies greatly in different companies and that the maturity level of occupational safety and health management also depends on the size of the company. It was found that the quality of occupational safety and health (OSH) management in larger companies is significantly better than in small and medium-sized companies, as can be seen in Figure 6. The diagram shows that the calculated safety management maturity level score increases proportional with the number of employees in the company. This is largely due to the fact that larger companies with more than 50 employees usually employ experts who are exclusively concerned with improving occupational safety in the company (Wo?ll and Suli?kova?, 2023).

The occupational safety performance could be measured in different areas as “degree of organisational structure of occupational safety” or “structured and defined handling of deviations”. The following table 3 shows the different aspects and their connection to usual safety management programs. It is easy to see that all management systems cover the different aspects, even if they use different formulations or require different methods. The Safety Culture Ladder (SCL) system takes a different approach here, clearly focussing on safety culture and placing less emphasis on formalities. It also sees itself as a complementary system and not as an alternative to SCC or ISO 45001 (NEN, 2017).

It can also be observed that the frequency of accidents in companies initially increases as the number of employees increases, and then decreases again. This could be due to the fact that the organisational effort of occupational safety and health increases considerably, but the threshold of economic efficiency to hire an employee who is an expert only in occupational safety and health is only reached at about 500 employees if one does not calculate the accident costs, but only the pure personnel costs of the safety specialist. The threshold for introducing a certified occupational safety and health management system, which can better support the increased organisational effort in larger companies, is also only exceeded in most companies from around 300 employees. Here, the share of companies with a certified management system is already about 52%, while the share in companies with between 51 and 300 employees is only about 21% (Wo?ll and Suli?kova?, 2023).

Strategies against personal causes of occupational accidents

In the history of the occupational safety, the focus was placed more in the technical and the organisational prevention of occupational accidents. This could be partly due to the fact that in the past, technicians and engineers were more likely to be involved in the organisation of occupational safety (Bo?rdlein, 2015), since in Germany, for example, training as a master craftsman, technician or engineer was the mandatory requirement for state-recognised training as a safety specialist. Today these regulations are a little bid wider so that also non- technicians could be trained as safety experts (Berufsgenossenschaft Holz und Metall, 2012; Bundesregierung, 2013). Technical solutions in occupational safety and health are also usually the most effective solutions. If a machine has been built safely and there is no longer any possibility of injuring oneself on it, then no accidents can occur. The decrease in the number of accidents to today's level compared to earlier times is mainly due to the improvement of technology and technical solutions in occupational safety and health. (Bo?rdlein, 2015)

On the other hand, it could perhaps also be due to the fact that occupational safety and health is partly historically rooted in the technical inspection associations and that the sponsors of these associations also had a technical rather than psychological view of the relevant accidents (Ueko?tter, 2013). For example, it was only in 2013 that the legislator in Germany demanded that mental hazards be taken into account in occupational health and safety. Previously, only material, technical and physical stresses had to be assessed. (Bundesanstalt fu?r Arbeitsschutz und Arbeitsmedizin, 2023)

In some companies, behavioral health and safety, which focuses more on the behavior of employees and their actions, has been practised intensively since the 19th century. An example of this is DuPont. In this company, accidents related to explosives occurred and strict rules were introduced, with dismissal expected for deviations (Bo?rdlein, 2015).

Since accidents at work caused by personal injury are by far the most frequent occupational accidents (Wo?ll and Suli?kova?, 2022b), the causes of these accidents are to be investigated in more detail. The focus of this paper is therefore on the investigation of behavior-related accidents at work, as the author sees the greatest potential for preventing accidents here and thus also the greatest potential for companies to reduce the number of accidents, prevent human suffering and save costs.

This article is part of a Dissertation Thesis:

DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.16114.11209