Posted By Brian One of my projects is to devise and implement a strategy to promote safety awareness amongst staff and management. This will take place across some 450 low risk supermarket sites. My particular bias will be toward management; in an endeavour to enhance their compliance with company safety procedures. Have IOSH colleagues any pointers, good sources of reference, positive experiences with initiatives/campaigns promoting safety awareness, which they would recommend? Similarly if any individual in the low risk retailing business (preferably multi-site) is interested in networking on this topic please let me know. My e mail address is: BIM@tao.sainsburys.co.uk Please don't mention behavioural safety! Thanks Brian

Posted By Ian Waldram Just I comment about the objective - I HATE the idea of promoting 'safety awareness', and have tried to get IOSH to stop using it in course titles, etc. For me the issue is - what are individuals expected to do AFTER your action plan that they didn't do BEFORE? Once you have defined this, you are into a training & competence plan, and of course this DOES involve an observable change in behaviour as a check that the training is successful. I suspect that by 'safety awareness' you are being asked for some combination of "Better Hazard Identification" and "Improved, cost-effective controls". Hopefully you are NOT being asked for "Better knowledge of what the law says" as on its own that won't improve anything! If I'm right, I'd start with some practical "5 steps" sessions, either using present risk assessments if they have them, or creating them if, like many organisations, you havn't quite got round to having documented assessments for all the key tasks and/or people. If a group thinks it has a good, simple, effective risk assessment process - check on some minor accidents that have happened and ask 3 questions: 1) Is the hazard that caused the accident identified in the RA? 2) Were the controls defined in the RA in place. If not, why not? 3) Are improved controls needed in the light of what happened? Has the RA been updated? If you get all "yeses" - the training isn't needed!

Posted By Ian Waldram Thanks for the comment. I have no problems with anything you say. I guess my concern is the potentially vague nature of 'awareness' - if it always leads to specific actions that's fine. What I'm worried about is the equivalent of the accident investigation recommendation "take more care", which is usually a sign that the investigation is 'blaming the person' rather than thinking hard about real root causes. After an OSH intervention, I'd like to be able to observe a difference, i.e. what are people doing that's different from before? If they are only 'more aware', I can't observe that, and so can't know whether the planned intervention was successful.

Posted By Geoff Burt Brian I was interested in your comment 'low risk supermarket sites'. You certainly couldn't say that about one of your larger rivals. There are numerous instances of criminal and civil cases against the various supermarkets and a recent fatality within the last few weeks highlights the problems. Geoff