Frank Guldenmund

• PhD
• Lecturer at Delft University of Technology

Background Speaking up among healthcare professionals plays an essential role in improving patient safety and quality of care, yet it remains complex and multifaceted behaviour. Despite awareness of potential risks and adverse outcomes for patients, professionals often hesitate to voice concerns due to various influencing factors. This complexity h...

Background Limited knowledge regarding the relative effectiveness of workplace accident prevention approaches creates barriers to informed decision‐making by policy makers, public health practitioners, workplace, and worker advocates. Objectives The objective of this review was to assess the effectiveness of broad categories of safety intervention...

No other concept in safety science is as studied, yet poorly understood (or measured) as safety culture. In this chapter, we aim to bring conceptual and methodological clarity to this field. Our proposition is that to effectively measure safety culture, one must firstly clearly define it, and align the research design and method with the definition...

In this paper we explore the meaning of safety in health care using the concepts of safety, barrier and risk and the Hazard-Barrier-Target model. Safety at the sharp end of health care very much relies on the decisions and actions of professionals providing care. To create safety at the sharp end we therefore need to focus on safety management proc...

Of all the events that contribute to deaths due to preventable medical errors in healthcare, ineffective communication is one of the most frequently identifiedprimary causes. Failure to speak up or to get others to listen is part of this ineffective communication. Therefore, speaking up behavior of healthcare workers is seen as an important factor...

The waste management sector is dominated by micro and small-sized enterprises. Although it is possible to anticipate that they may face the same problems as other small firms, information about activities related to the prevention of occupational risks in this sector and how this influences Occupational Health & Safety (OHS) performance is still li...

Safety culture remains an elusive concept, not only for scholars and practitioners but for the workers who actually have to deal with safety on a daily basis as well. The metaphor of football provides particular working groups a medium to explore the meaning of safety culture by drawing parallels with team roles, changing working conditions, the im...

“Few things are so sought after and yet so little understood.” With this pithy statement, psychologist James Reason expressed the potential value but also the elusiveness of this complex social-scientific concept twenty years ago (Reason, Managing the risks of organizational accidents. Ashgate, Aldershot, 1997). Culture had been on the mind of safe...

Since the introduction of the concept of culture in the safety domain, much effort has been put into its assessment. Such assessments are typically carried out to come to a diagnosis and, possibly, a culture improvement. While the relationship between culture and behavior remains ambiguous and the odds of steering a culture into a desirable directi...

Performing safely in an SME environment is not always an easy task. In order to perform safely, the enterprise needs to have clear safety concerns, eventually supported by a (documented) safety policy and ensure that these concerns (or policy) are implemented and maintained. However, this is often (wrongly) seen as a ‘never-ending burden’ that ‘has...

This paper describes safety management systems (SMSs) on five core aspects: definition, evolution, models, purpose and common elements of SMSs. A safety management system implements safety management activities, so an overview of definitions of safety and safety management sheds light on the content of an SMS. SMSs emerged from the risk concept and...

Safety Management Systems usually follow specified formats, as required by standards and other procedures. The quality of such systems is often obtained with assessments at the ordinal measurement level. This paper introduces a barrier-based safety management system coupled with a quantitative approach to safety management modelling. The risk manag...

Organisations spend a considerable amount of time and effort on diagnosing and analysing risks within their organisation. In the area of occupational and process safety, a myriad of employee survey instruments is available. Many studies show that operational processes play an important role in an organisations overall safety. Yet, so far safety sur...

The bowtie method is becoming more popular, but it lacks a consistent approach. This article reviews the available literature and identifies the different approaches that are taken. There are two main types of bowties. Quantitative bowties and Qualitative bowties. Most Quantitative bowties use a fault tree together with an event tree and barriers t...

Organizational safety culture seems to follow the same route of theoretical development that organizational culture has followed. Initially coined as a variable explaining large-scale organizational performance (in case of organizational culture: organizational success; in case of organizational safety culture: disaster) the construct has now been...

Occupational health and safety remains a critical issue for academics and practitioners, given the impact that occupational accidents and work-related ill-health has on individuals, families, organizations, and societies worldwide. This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in this book. The book examines the influences on...

CONTENTS: Paweł Kawalec, Rafał Wierzchosławski: Introduction List of Contributors Mirosław Skibniewski: Achieving Excellence in Project and Program Management in Poland through Creation of a Dedicated Center for Project and Program Management Bernhard Callebaut: The Ecological Challenge as a Call for Another Humanism. An Interdisciplinary Approach...

Learning from incidents, accidents and disasters contributes to improvement of safety and the prevention of unwanted events. In this review, literature on learning from safety incidents within organizations is studied and compared with the organizational learning theory of Argyris and Schön. Sub-processes, such as learning lessons, sharing, storing...

An exploratory study was carried out in three European countries – Denmark, United Kingdom and the Netherlands – concerning the safety of migrant workers, especially those coming from Eastern European countries. Special attention was given to the relationship between safety and the national background of migrant workers. Forty-four interviews with...

The Dutch Ministry of Social Affairs and Employment provided subsidy over the period 2004–2008 to a number of companies to introduce changes aimed at reducing accidents by changing their safety culture and aspects of their safety management. As part of the programme a scientific evaluation was set up to assess the effectiveness of the interventions...

Although the concept of safety culture was coined in relation to major accidents like Chernobyl and Piper Alpha, it has been embraced by the safety community at large as a cause for unsafe practice. In this article, three approaches to safety culture are discussed in terms of their underlying concepts of culture and organizational culture. Culture...

The objective of this review is to assess the effectiveness of Safety Interventions in Preventing Accidents at Work (SIPAW):  Compare safety interventions to no treatment, treatment as usual or alternative intervention.  If possible examine (constituent) components of safety interventions which appear to enhance the effectiveness of Safety interv...

The study of safety culture is as popular as ever. In this paper various approaches towards the study of safety culture are presented accompanied by a metaphorical image. Successively, the net, the castle in the air, the porcupine, the mirror, the thing and the piece of art are discussed. None of the approaches can provide the final word on safety...

The match between safety and culture was made around 1986, when the INSAG delivered its initial report on the Chernobyl accident. Whether the marriage is a happy one is still a matter of debate, but it is most definitely a fruitful one. In the past twenty years, many researchers have devoted much effort to both the theoretical development of the co...

This article discusses the results from a safety culture research project at a service company that carries out non-destructive research at various locations in the Netherlands. The extent to which workers are guided by organisational safety culture when executing their daily work is explored. More conventional management and supervisory activities...

Questionnaires have not been particularly successful in exposing the core of an organisational safety culture. This is clear both from the factors found and the relations between these and safety indicators. The factors primarily seem to denote an overall evaluation of management, which does not say much about cultural basic assumptions. In additio...

This paper describes the development of a management model to control barriers devised to prevent major hazard scenarios. Additionally, an audit technique is explained that assesses the quality of such a management system. The final purpose of the audit technique is to quantify those aspects of the management system that have a direct impact on the...

As part of the EU-sponsored ARAMIS project (Salvi et al 2001) an audit tool was developed to assess the way in which companies manage the barriers which they choose to control the risks from major hazard scenarios. The audit is a version of the one devised in the I-Risk project (Oh et al 1998), modified to focus on barriers rather than base events...

This is a manual setting out the definition and auditing of barriers used in hazard and risk management in major hazard industries in the ARAMIS, European Union funded project managed by INERIS in France.

The paper describes the methods used for a study of the safety management system and culture of a cold rolling mill in a steel plant. It uses data from diverse sources which can be validated against each other and combined to produce a rich picture of the current risk control system and its shortcomings. The paper also describes the proposed improv...

This paper reviews the literature on safety culture and safety climate. The main emphasis is on applied research customary in the social psychological or organisational psychological traditions. Although safety culture and climate are generally acknowledged to be important concepts, not much consensus has been reached on the cause, the content and...

The I-Risk Safety Management System & Audit. The aim of the I-Risk project is to link the technical and management parts of the integrated model at a more detailed level of analysis than was the case with earlier projects. This means that the technical model breaks down the factors leading to loss of containment into their constituent fault and ev...

This paper describes an integrated risk approach to auditing developed in the European Community project I-Risk1. A major hazard installation at a particular plant is the focus of a technical model. Supplied with this information, along with other documentation of the plant, a safety management audit is tailored and carried out to modify particular...

This report is ,a deliverable in the ARAMIS project. It described the background,of the safety management concept,and the methodology to assess the quality of safety management. A detailed audit manual and the Safety Culture Questionnaire are attached as ,annexes to ,this report. Preliminary responses,from ,the test cases suggest ,that the methodol...

The Dutch Ministry of Social Affairs and Employment has been running a program to improve the safety performance of companies and reduce the accident rate in the country significantly. One aspect of this program was to provide a 50% subsidy to a selected number of companies to help them finance interventions to improve safety performance. The chose...