What works in delivering improved health and safety outcomes

http://www.hse.gov.uk/research/rrpdf/rr654.pdf

What works in delivering improved health and safety outcomes?
The following interventions were found to be effective at some level: using face to face communication to educate and inform; new interventions involving Occupational Health Service (OHS) provision, especially in relation to prevention and cure of Musculoskeletal Disorders (MSDs); regulation among employers and workers who comply; tools and Safety and Health Awareness Days (SHADs) are helpful for willing and committed employers; worker involvement techniques such as worker health and safety representatives can be effective in disseminating health and safety messages and generating behavioural change; targeted initiatives can behelpful in enabling setting objectives and encouraging progress towards sectoral health and safety improvements.
What are the knowledge gaps?
The largest overall knowledge gap identified where further research is required was to identify which levers are most effective in obtaining behavioural change in health and safety practice at an individual and corporate level. This gap has a number of aspects including: which groups are most influential on changing worker behaviour, the power of supply chains, economic and financial incentives and the effects of sanctions including adverse publicity and restorative justice, understanding the roles of industry partnerships and intermediaries, assessing the impact of interventions used in combination with each other, identifying ‘what works’ in LA enforced sectors and/or those with migrant workers, understanding work process design and identifying the effects of targeting interventions.
How could HSE improve its use and generation of evidence?
A number of barriers to better use and generation of evidence in HSE were identified. These included time pressures, political pressures, knowledge management problems and use of analysts.
The suggestions put forward by HSE staff for making evidence accessible were making more use of workshops/seminars; written summaries; electronic media. Many also emphasised that proactive evidence supply was as important as format. Interviewees made very little use of existing documented evidence in the form of commissioned research reports and externally published evidence and relied on statistics and their own networks for evidence.
HSE could improve how it uses evidence by: agreeing on what constitutes ‘good enough’ evidence, implementing multiple channels for dissemination and access to evidence eg flexible searches of HSE databases, a web-based set of resources on evidence-based policy making and case studies of good practice, internal seminars to disseminate tacit knowledge, provide short email digests and summaries targeted by topic/sector/programme. HSE could improve how it generates evidence by introducing a rigorous commissioning process for interventions and research, building on the Science Planning Process. This would require:
■ consideration of a broader evidence base before and during commissioning of research, design, delivery and evaluation of policy interventions; developing closer working between analysts and internal policy clients; making greater use of longitudinal independent checks on behavioural change in evaluations; potentially undertaking fewer, more focussed evaluations, for example restricting evaluations to interventions where full ex-ante appraisal of intervention choices has been made and a quantifiable impact on outcomes is anticipated; undertaking more small scale studies, secondary reviews or meta-analyses of ‘what works’.