Morning Lee - your posting has been read nearly 50 times without answer.

Which makes me wonder whether you might wish to clarify your question, which, as drafted, would make a good exam question!

There is a huge library of literature discussing the research and philosophy of proactive, reactive and more usually proactive AND reactive systems.

Not the first, but one of the starting points was the original edition of HSG65 "Successful health and safety management".

But long before HSG65 was published the principles in the "Deming Cycle" were set out. Whilst many tools commonly used were originated in an effort to improve productivity and quality, they are equally relevant to health and safety. Exsmples Ishikawa ("Fishbone") analysis and 5Ys.

P

Hi Lee

In that case, I think you first ports of call are possibly the current edition of HSG65 now called simply "Managing health and safety" but referencing PDCA rather than the POPMAR approach in the original edition

+ HSG101 "The cost to Britain of workplace accidents and work-related ill health in 1995/96" which might help your reactively minded people understand quite how much it costs only to do things once things have gone wrong.

HSG101 is an update on the original "The costs of accidents at work" which was groundbreaking when HSE published it, but didn't address work-related ill health. 

But the numbers in HSG101 are over 20 years old, so you could also visit www.hse.gov.uk/statistics which will take you to the pages that look at current estimates of numbers and severities of work-related accidents and ill health and the associated costs.

One of the problems is that employers only pick up a small fraction of the societal costs and this is particularly true when it comes to the chronic work-related ill health that very few organisations try to keep track of.