• Medical Device Usability
• Healthcare Human Factors
• Cross Cultural Usability
• Independent Research
• Oil & Gas Human Factors
• Occupational Ergonomics

Safety Culture Assessment

The term ‘safety culture’ was coined in the late 1980s following the Chernobyl nuclear accident to characterise a poor and risky mindset among management and staff.

Since then, the concept, which introduces a special set of safety aspects of ‘organisational culture’, has extended from the process industry to other industries, such as aviation, rail, and, more recently, healthcare.

Assessing safety culture involves finding out about the strong and weak aspects of the organisation that characterise safety. Examples include:

• Learning and reporting of incidents, reasons for not reporting, perceived causes of incidents
• Motivation, trust and risk perception
• Communication and teamwork
• Accountability, responsibility and employee commitment
• Management, safety procedures and policies
• Human-machine interfaces (socio-technical systems)
• Perceptions of performance-influencing factors (e.g. fatigue, workload, training, equipment design)