Safety culture development, research, and implementation in China: An overview

The relationship among safety leadership, risk perception, safety culture, and safety performance: Military volunteer soldiers as a case study

Safety is fundamental to any organization; if not based on safety, organizational decision-making and management would be meaningless. For a country, soldiers are responsible for national security; they serve as a barrier that defends a country against external invasive forces, thus assuming great missions and responsibilities on their shoulders. To ensure soldiers fulfill their duties of protecting the country and the people, they should gain clear risk perception, which should be instilled into them during their daily combat readiness training. Only when their performances meet safety criteria can they become a strong fighting force. This study recruited military volunteer soldiers as its research participants and employed convenience sampling to distribute questionnaires. In total, this research collected 725 valid copies, of which the data were used to explore the relationship among safety leadership, risk perception, safety culture, and safety performance. To achieve this goal, this study proposed some research hypotheses based on literature review. The hypotheses were all verified via latent variable modeling and multiple hierarchical regression analysis after the reliability and validity of each construct had been tested via confirmatory factor analysis. The research results showed that the more deeply military volunteer soldiers sense safety leadership, the clearer their risk perception will be and the more helpful it would be in achieving safety performance. It is worth mentioning that risk perception can serve as a mediator while safety culture can mediate the relationship between safety leadership and safety performance. Lastly, the research proposes suggestions in the section of conclusions, which provides reference to the combat readiness training and daily tasks of soldiers.

Development of occupational health culture scale: A study based on miners and construction workers

Culture is an essential influence on effectiveness of workplace health promotion, which can promote occupational health protection behavior. The aim of this research was to develop and validate an occupational health culture scale available to Chinese workers. Occupational health culture scale (OHCS) was developed based on elements of health culture and safety culture in workplace. Nine techniques steps of scale development were used, including a 15-member expert group, 10 workers for cognitive interview, and 1,119 questionnaires (from 710 miners and 409 construction workers) for formal investigation. Welch's variance analysis, independent samples t-test, Kruskal-Wallis test, Spearman correlation analysis was employed, respectively, to verified nine hypotheses about impact relationship on OHCS score. After the analysis reliability and validity, the final scale consisted of 21 items in five domains: leadership support, co-workers support, values, policy and norms, employee involvement, physical environment. Moreover, respirable dust concentration from individual sampler had the largest negative correlation coefficient on OHCS score, -0.469 (p < 0.01). The development of an occupational health culture among Chinese workers is necessary for the sustainability of human resources and the implementation of corporate responsibility.

Safety Culture Measurement Among Chinese Undergraduates at a Private University: Development and Validation

Relatively low level of safety culture among undergraduates and the imperfection of safety management system for students in university result in numerous safety problems. Researches on the safety culture of undergraduates in public universities are much more than those in private universities. Aiming to find out the potential and specific factors that affect the safety culture in the former are different from those in the latter, an anonymous questionnaire survey was conducted among 4,531 students in a private university in Shaanxi province, China. Gender, education background, grade, hometown, one-child policy, major, community, and driver's license on their safety beliefs and behaviors are treated as potential factors in the survey. According to the average score of each item, the investigated private university students are lack of safety knowledge, but perform well in traffic safety behavior. The results show that female students show better safety beliefs and safety behaviors than male students whilst the safety beliefs and safety behaviors of the student majoring in medicine is better than those of students in other majors. The students who live in more developed cities, who are from one-child family and who have driving license, show better safety beliefs and safety behaviors than others. The effective community system of mixed majors is conducive to the formation of good safety beliefs and safety behaviors of college students. The results highlighted that universities should formulate the corresponding intervention strategies to prevent safety problems of the college students according to the specific proportion of gender, major distribution and other actual situation.

Conceptualizing the Contextual Dynamics of Safety Climate and Safety Culture Research: A Comparative Scientometric Analysis

Safety climate and safety culture are important research domains in risk and safety science, and various industry and service sectors show significant interest in, and commitment to, applying its concepts, theories, and methods to enhance organizational safety performance. Despite the large body of literature on these topics, there are disagreements about the scope and focus of these concepts, and there is a lack of systematic understanding of their development patterns and the knowledge domains on which these are built. This article presents a comparative analysis of the literature focusing on safety climate and safety culture, using various scientometric analysis approaches and tools. General development patterns are identified, including the publication trends, in terms of temporal and geographical activity, the science domains in which safety culture and safety climate research occurs, and the scientific domains and articles that have primarily influenced their respective development. It is found that the safety culture and safety climate domains show strong similarities, e.g., in dominant application domains and frequently occurring terms. However, safety culture research attracts comparatively more attention from other scientific domains, and the research domains rely on partially different knowledge bases. In particular, while measurement plays a role in both domains, the results suggest that safety climate research focuses comparatively more on the development and validation of questionnaires and surveys in particular organizational contexts, whereas safety culture research appears to relate these measurements to wider organizational features and management mechanisms. Finally, various directions for future research are identified based on the obtained results.

The effect of education around ethical principles on nurses' perception to patient safety culture in an Iranian mental health inpatient unit: a pilot study

Background & objectives

Patient safety is a crucial factor in the provision of quality healthcare and is therefore a global health concern. It is an area in which ethical concerns and high-quality clinical practice are inextricably linked. This study investigates the effect of education around ethical principles on nurses’ perception of patient safety in a psychiatric unit.

Materials & methods

This pre- and post-test descriptive study was conducted in a mental health inpatient unit in a hospital in Tehran, capital of Iran, in 2018. A total of 33 nurses, selected by census sampling, participated in the study. Data was collected using a demographics questionnaire and Hospital Survey on Patient Safety Culture (HSOPSC), and was analyzed with SPSS21.

Results

The mean score of patient safety was 116.85 ± 9.98 before the educational intervention, 143.58 ± 7.21 immediately after intervention, and 153.12 ± 9.47 1 month after intervention. The rate of error report by most participants over the past 12 months was 3–5 and 6–10 events before intervention, and 6–10 events immediately after and 1 month after intervention. Also, 42.4% of the participants assessed patient safety after intervention as very good and 36.4% assessed it as acceptable and very good 1 month after intervention whereas most of the participants (45.5%) assessed patient safety as acceptable before intervention.

Conclusion

Education on ethical principles exerts a positive effect on nurses’ perception of patient safety culture. Thus, it is recommended as an effective method of promoting nurses’ perception of this variable. In this way, healthcare quality and enhanced patient safety can be achieved.

Using an evidence-based safety approach to develop China's road safety strategies

Background

Road accidents are a major global public safety and health problem. Presently, many countries such as China urgently need to find better strategies to improve their road safety. This paper has two key objectives, which are: (i) to propose potential solutions to improve China’s road safety, and (ii) to provide China and other countries with helpful evidence for their future road safety.

Methods

This study attempts to use an evidence-based safety approach to propose some potential strategies for China’s road safety.

Results

First, the current status of China’s road safety was analyzed. Second, major road safety problems in China were identified and discussed. Finally, this paper illustrates China’s road safety strategies based on available evidence.

Conclusions

Presently and in the future, China’s road safety is facing a series of problems, such as increasing road safety management pressure, the weak road safety management foundation, and the lack of government supervision. To improve road safety, China should adopt a comprehensive strategy, which includes road safety risk prevention and control, road safety legislation, road safety supervision, road safety research and its application, road safety propaganda and education, and road safety culture, etc.

Relevance Proof of Safety Culture in Coal Mine Industry

This paper intends to use data to verify the correlation between safety culture, safety management system and safety knowledge, safety awareness, and safety habits, which is the correlation between the various parts of the behavior safety “2-4” model. Due to data limitations, the results are limited to the study of safety culture related relationships in coal mining enterprises. This paper first designed a questionnaire containing 30 questions, of which 1–5 questions represent safety culture, 6–22 questions represent safety management system, and 23–30 questions represent safety knowledge, safety awareness and safety habits. Employees of 27 coal mining enterprises in Shandong, Henan, Hunan and other places in China were surveyed and sampled by stratified random sampling, and 1514 valid questionnaires were obtained. After item analysis and correlation analysis, and it was found that, within the data of 1514 questionnaires, the item total correlation coefficients of questions 6, 9, 19 and 28 were all less than 0.2, indicating that the identification degree of these four items was poor, which was deleted. Using the data analysis of the remaining 26 questions in the questionnaire, it was found that the relationship between safety culture and the safety management system, the safety management system and safety knowledge, and safety awareness and safety habits is moderately related; safety culture and safety knowledge, safety awareness and safety habits are weakly related. The conclusion shows that the safety culture directly affects the safety management system; the safety management system directly affects the safety knowledge, safety awareness and safety habits; the safety culture indirectly affects safety knowledge, safety awareness and safety habits. However, why the expected strong correlation is not achieved, and whether the same conclusion can be obtained if the data scale is expanded or other types of enterprises are added for questionnaire measurement, these are questions worthy of further study, which is also the author’s next research content.