Developing, implementing and evaluating OSH interventions in SMEs: a pilot, exploratory study

Donato Masi, Enrico Cagno, Guido JL Micheli

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract

The literature on occupational safety and health (OSH) interventions contains many debates on how interventions should work, but far less attention has been paid to how they actually do work, and to the contextual factors that influence their implementation, development and effect. The need of improving the understanding of the OSH interventions issue is particularly relevant for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), since they experience worse OSH conditions, and have fewer physical, economic and organizational resources if compared to larger enterprises; thus, SMEs strongly need to focus their few resources in the decision-making process so as to select and put in place only the most proper interventions. This exploratory study is based on interviews with safety officers of 5 SMEs, and it gives an overview of the key features of the actual intervention process in SMEs and of the contextual factors making this actual intervention process similar or dissimilar to the ideal case. The results show how much qualitative and experience driven the actual intervention process is; they should be used to direct the future research towards an increasingly applicable one, to enable practitioners from SMEs to develop, implement and evaluate their OSH interventions in an “ideal” way.
Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)385-405
Number of pages21
JournalInternational Journal of Occupational Safety and Ergonomics
Volume20
Issue number3
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 31 Dec 2014

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