Safety-related Policies Research Articles

Corelationship Between Contractor Safety Management And Safety Leadership : Systematic Review

The presence of effective safety leadership significantly impacts how workers perceive the significance of safety in the workplace. Safety environment is to the collective attitudes of employees regarding an organization's safety-related policies, practices, and procedures that indicate the importance placed on safety (Omidi et all., 2022; Omidi et all., 2021; Zohar and Luria, 2010). The contractors are responsible for upholding two specific types of safety leadership, with a particular emphasis on transformational leadership. This study use the literature review according to PRISMA guidelines. The necessity of safety leadership in construction projects, particularly in the context of contractor safety management. Safety leadership is considered as a vital aspect in persuading workers to adopt safe behaviors, decreasing accidents, and increasing overall safety performance. The studies show the positive influence of safety leadership on safety compliance, engagement, and safety outcomes, and the need of addressing the safety leadership styles of all stakeholders engaged in a construction project, including owners, contractors, and subcontractors.

A comprehensive review on helmet detection and number plate recognition approaches

Motorbikes serve as the primary mode of transportation in most countries as they are cost effective and appropriate for a nuclear family. But it has been observed that more than 70% of the users do not prefer to wear safety helmets for various reasons jeopardizing their lives and falling prey to accidents. The most prevalent method for ensuring this right now is traffic police manually monitoring the motorcyclists. But due to excess traffic and limited traffic personnels, many violators go unrecognized and continue to practice the same. Thus, it is important to eliminate the human intervention and automate the monitoring system using deep learning and computer vision-based techniques. Our proposed system implements this by extracting number plate of helmet violators and generates an e-challan on the registered mobile number. We propose using a custom trained YOLO-v8 model for violation detection and YOLO-v8 + EasyOCR for number plate detection and extraction. Canny Edge Detection is a preprocessing step that can be used to enhance the edges of objects in an image, making them more distinguishable. This system holds great potential for enhancing safety-related policies and ensuring strict enforcement of traffic regulations. Additionally, it contributes to the advancement of traffic management through the implementation of an AI-based automated traffic violation and ticketing system.

연구실 문화유형이 연구활동종사자들의 안전행동에 미치는 영향

The purpose of this study is to classify laboratory culture types into four types: group culture, development culture, hierarchical culture, and rational culture, and to confirm the mediating effect of safety climate in the relationship of influence on safety behavior. Through this, we aim to contribute to preventing accidents that occur in laboratories by providing basic data for establishing future laboratory safety-related policies and securing safety education directions. To this end, a survey tool was developed based on previous research to test the influence between laboratory culture type, safety climate, and safety behavior. The survey was conducted online targeting people engaged in research activities subject to the Laboratory Safety Act, a total of 420 were collected, and the final 364 were used for analysis.
 The main research results are as follows. First, the types of laboratory group culture, development culture, hierarchical culture, and rational culture were all found to have a positive effect on the laboratory safety climate. Second, the types of laboratory group culture, development culture, hierarchical culture, and rational culture were all found to have a positive effect on the safety behavior of researchers. Third, the laboratory safety climate was found to play a mediating role in the relationship between the influence of laboratory culture type on researchers' safety behavior. Fourth, among the sub-factors of laboratory safety climate, safety regulations and safety education were found to play a mediating role in the relationship between the influence of laboratory group culture, development culture, hierarchical culture, and rational culture on safety compliance behavior, which is a sub-factor of safety behavior. Fifth, among the sub-factors of laboratory safety climate, safety education and safety communication were found to play a mediating role in the relationship between the influence of laboratory group culture, development culture, hierarchical culture, and rational culture on safety participation, which is a sub-factor of safety behavior.
 Summarizing these results, all types of laboratory culture were found to have a positive effect on the safety behavior of researchers, and safety climate was found to play a mediating role in these relationships. In detail, it was found that in order to increase safety compliance behavior, the laboratory's safety regulations and safety education should be strengthened, and in order to increase safety participation behavior, laboratory safety education and safety communication should be strengthened. In particular, among the safety climate sub-factors, safety education appears to mediate the relationship between all variables, so institutional safety environment managers and laboratory directors need to pay special attention to ensure that safety education is successfully completed by those engaged in research activities.

Opinions of active transportation users on policies to ensure their perceived safety in the era of autonomous vehicles

Active transportation users, including pedestrians and bicyclists, have expressed significant safety concerns over the co-existence of autonomous vehicles (AVs) on the road in the future. However, insufficient emphasis has been paid to exploring the demands of safety-related public policies with empirical evidence, and even much of the previous literature has not fully incorporated the viewpoints of the active transportation users. Thus, this study explored the opinions of active transportation users on five safety-related policies in the era of AVs: (1) a speed limit restriction (policy 1), (2) human-occupied AVs at all times (policy 2), (3) active engagement of human drivers in school zones (policy 3), (4) trip-related data sharing (policy 4), and (5) AV technology-related data sharing (policy 5). This study developed five multinomial logit models using the 2019 BikePGH survey data collected in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and revealed the following main findings. First, active transportation users who reported feeling extremely safe when sharing the road with AVs were significantly more likely to believe that none of the five policies were necessary. However, those who believed AVs would harm traffic injuries and fatalities favored policies 2 and 3. Also, those negatively affected by the fatal crash in Arizona expressed the need for policies 1 and 2. Additionally, those who have shared the road with AVs believed that policies 1, 2, and 3 were crucial. This research will benefit AV stakeholders, particularly transportation officials and planners, as it will offer guidelines to ensure the perceived safety of vulnerable road users and make roads safer for them in the AV era.

Two-Wheeler Vehicle Traffic Violations Detection and Automated Ticketing for Indian Road Scenario

Traffic violation monitoring and control is a major concern in India due to excess crowd, increasing commuters, bad traffic signal management, and rider mentality. It is obvious that physical traffic police-based monitoring alone is insufficient to monitor such large traffic volumes and simultaneously track violations. This has led to many violators going unnoticed. The violators, in turn, cause more serious mishaps on the road resulting in danger to their own life as well as to other’s life. Thus, there is a need for incorporating Artificial Intelligence (AI)-based techniques to eliminate manual intervention for the detection and catching of violators. In this paper, we propose a system to automatically detect two-wheeler violations like not wearing a helmet, usage of a phone while riding, triple riding, wheeling, and illegal parking for Indian road scenarios and eventually automating the ticketing process by capturing the violations and corresponding vehicle number in a database. We propose using a custom trained Yolo-v4 + DeepSORT for violation detection and tracking and Yolo-v4 + Tesseract for number plate detection and extraction. This implementation obtained a mean average precision (mAP) of 98.09% for violation detection and an accuracy of 99.41% for number plate detection on the test data. Further, the system detected 77 out of 93 violations with zero false positives in real-life scenarios. Thus,showing that the traffic violation system developed can be used to automate traffic violation ticketing. The developed system would be particularly useful in deriving various safety-related policies and will help to enforce strong regulation of traffic rules and build towards a smart city ecosystem via the automated AI-based traffic violation and ticketing system.

Profile Study of Motorcyclists Victims in Road Traffic Accidents at Jaipur Region- An Observational Antemortem Study

World Health Organization defined accidents as ‘’ an unexpected, unplanned occurrence which may involve injury’’1.Only 28 countries, covering 7% of the world’s population, have comprehensive road safety laws on all five key risk factors: drinking and driving, speeding, and failing to use helmets, seat-belts, and child restraints as per the global status report on Road Safety 2013 by World Health Organization1. India is undergoing major economic and demographic transition coupled with increasing urbanization and motorization. Injuries on roads, at homes, and in the workplace have increased due to lack of safety-related policies and programs. The health sector bears the maximum brunt in terms of provision of acute care, and short-term and long term rehabilitation service. This study describes profile of motorcyclists’ victims in road traffic accidents observation done and they were compared with the previous studies.This study was conducted toanalyzethe sociodemographic profile of motorcycle crashes among total cases of RTA.During study period, a total number of 22618 patients were admitted to trauma centre, from which 10564 were road traffic accident cases, from which 25 % were two wheeler clashes.

Epidemiological characteristics of road traffic injuries accepted by Shenzhen Emergency Center from 2010 to 2018

Objective To investigate the current situation of road traffic injuries (RTI) among the population in Shenzhen from 2010 to 2018, and to provide references and suggestions for improving road traffic safety related policies and traffic injures prevention in Shenzhen. Methods Retrospective analysis was performed on the RTI data accepted by the Emergency Comprehensive Information Query Platform of Shenzhen Emergency Center from 2010 to 2018, and statistics were made on the overall situation, population characteristics, time, regional distribution and severity of RTI in Shenzhen. Results From 2010 to 2018, there were 79 369 cases of RTI in Shenzhen, and the ratio of injuries to instant deaths was 79.66∶1. The incidence of RTI in Shenzhen Emergency Center was generally decreasing (χtrend2=8.200, P=0.004), and the on-site death rate was also showed a decreasing (χtrend2=4.604, P=0.032) trend. The incidence rate of male was 478.90 per 100 000, which was higher than that of female (223.92 per 100 000, χ2=92.823, P Conclusion According to the epidemiological characters from 2010 to 2018, the key points to preventing and controlling RTI would be: improving the road traffic management system; improving the traffic safety awareness of the key crowds; strengthening the roads regulation during the rush hours; deploying the emergency resources more rationally; shorting the emergency response time; improving the first aid system and service mode; and developing scientific precautionary measures.

Recent (2011-2017) foodborne outbreak cases in the Republic of Korea compared to the United States: a review.

This study analyzes and compares foodborne disease outbreaks reported in the Republic of Korea (KR) and the United States (US) during 2011-2017. The foodborne outbreaks data in the KR and the US were collected from the Ministry of Food and Drug Safety and from the Surveillance for Foodborne Disease Outbreaks United States, respectively. The average number of outbreaks and illness population were higher in the US than in the KR, but the KR's illness ratio considering population size was 2.4 times higher than that of the US. When the sites of outbreaks compared, the number of illness was the highest at schools in the KR whereas outbreaks at restaurants were more frequent in the US. In the KR, bacterial infections were the primary cause of outbreaks while bacterial and viral infections accounted for the largest share of outbreaks in the US. Specifically, pathogenic E. coli presented a significant risk in the KR whereas Salmonella was the most prevalent in the US. These results indicate that the main microbiological targets for detection and control in the KR should differ from the US, which should be considered for developing food safety related policies.

Comparing the Psychosocial Safety Climate between Megaprojects and Non-Megaprojects: Evidence from China

Compared to non-megaprojects, megaprojects are often more complex and riskier, and construction employees are thus susceptible to a higher level of psychosocial hazards, which adversely affect their psychosocial health and safety performance. The psychosocial safety climate evaluates the employees’ perceived level of psychosocial health and safety of the workplace and reveals the causes of psychosocial hazards that need to be addressed; it is, therefore, of great significance to determine whether the psychosocial safety climate (PSC) of megaprojects is different from that of non-megaprojects. A questionnaire survey is described involving 10 megaprojects and 143 non-megaprojects in China. The results show that, contrary to expectations, the psychosocial safety climate of megaprojects is significantly better than that of non-megaprojects. Compared with those of non-megaprojects, the employees of megaprojects have a higher common perception of the organization’s emphasis on psychosocial health and safety-related policies, procedures, and behavioral practices in work processes. This research, for the first time, demonstrates and tests the use of the psychosocial safety climate scale (PSC-12) for measuring the construction industry’s PSC, provides insights for understanding the psychosocial safety climate of megaprojects, and serves as a reference for organizational management to intervene in employees’ psychosocial health and correct unsafe behaviors. It also contributes to theoretical research and the measurement standards of psychological safety in megaprojects.

Intercity variability and local factors influencing the level of pesticide residues in marketed fruits and vegetables of China

Controlling pesticide residues in marketed fruits and vegetables is an essential issue for food safety and public health. Local governments improve local conditions, like policymaking and implementation, economic structure and development level, and agricultural practices, to control pesticide residues. However, the level of influence and relative importance of these local factors are not analyzed quantitatively. Here we present the food safety level across 42 Chinese cities as measured by the level of pesticide residues (LPR) in fresh fruits and vegetables, and explore how local socio-economic and policy factors influence its intercity variability. A total of 12,070 sample measurements were used in this study. The relationships between LPR and local socio-economic-policy factors were tested by using Pearson correlation analysis, two-sided independent t-test, and stepwise multivariable linear regression. Our analysis shows that: (1) the pesticide residues in 97.1% of the samples were within legal limits, but the LPR had a considerable cross-city disparity and (2) eight socio-economic-policy variables were found to be significantly correlated with LPR at the city level. Six policy-related variables, namely the number of pesticide-related policies, the number of food safety-related policies, the number of food safety-related news reports, the supermarket revolution, the administrative level of the city and the transparency of supervision of food safety, could explain 32.8% of the intercity variability of LPR. This was followed by the gross domestic product (GDP) per capita from the tertiary sector (15.6%) and the pesticide usage per cultivated area in local agriculture (13.4%). After eliminating the collinearity of these variables, local socio-economic-policy factors collectively could explain around 40% of the intercity variability of LPR. This indicates that local-level policy may have a larger impact on local food safety in terms of LPR than economic factors or local agricultural practice, underscoring the critical role of local government in ensuring food safety.

English

Environmental engineer is concerned with the protection and prevention of the environment and develops the solution to environmental problem. Environmental engineer ensures work place hazards and environmental health and safety related policies and procedure are communicated to employer and employees, ensures the availability of medical surveillance programme in assisting employer and employees in the course of potentially hazards, that can pose immediate danger to health and safety, encouraging conducive environment for stress free conditions in the environment. Consequently, restriction of stress to condition where an environmental demand exceeds the national regulatory capacity of an organism, in particular situations that include unpredictability and uncontrollability also ensuring employees are properly trained for their jobs and environmental health and safety obligation are carried out by everyone involved. Key words: Environment, stress, engineer, health and safety.

Adherence to recommended electronic health record safety practices across eight health care organizations.

The Safety Assurance Factors for EHR Resilience (SAFER) guides were released in 2014 to help health systems conduct proactive risk assessment of electronic health record (EHR)- safety related policies, processes, procedures, and configurations. The extent to which SAFER recommendations are followed is unknown. We conducted risk assessments of 8 organizations of varying size, complexity, EHR, and EHR adoption maturity. Each organization self-assessed adherence to all 140 unique SAFER recommendations contained within 9 guides (range 10-29 recommendations per guide). In each guide, recommendations were organized into 3 broad domains: "safe health IT" (total 45 recommendations); "using health IT safely" (total 80 recommendations); and "monitoring health IT" (total 15 recommendations). The 8 sites fully implemented 25 of 140 (18%) SAFER recommendations. Mean number of "fully implemented" recommendations per guide ranged from 94% (System Interfaces-18 recommendations) to 63% (Clinical Communication-12 recommendations). Adherence was higher for "safe health IT" domain (82.1%) vs "using health IT safely" (72.5%) and "monitoring health IT" (67.3%). Despite availability of recommendations on how to improve use of EHRs, most recommendations were not fully implemented. New national policy initiatives are needed to stimulate implementation of these best practices.

Key factors influencing management decisions concerning safety equipment selection

The construction industry involves many hazardous activities that may expose workers to a wide variety of health hazards. Selection of construction safety equipment is crucial in ensuring workers’ safety. This article aims to examine key factors influencing management decisions concerning safety equipment selection, utilizing exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and the analytic hierarchy process (AHP). A questionnaire survey is conducted in the construction companies in Bangkok, Thailand. The factor analysis extracts 103 sets of data into six key factors – namely supplier agreements, supplier support, personal, equipment design, safety-related policies and cost value factors – with a total of 20 associated items. The AHP results conclude that the safety-related policies, equipment design and personal factors are the most important factors when selecting construction safety equipment. A construction company can use the study results as a checklist to help assess different safety equipment, and to select the best equipment.

Determinants of Safe Organizational Climate and its Impact on Employee Performance: A Case of Marble Industries Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Pakistan

The purpose of this research paper was to discover different problems and disseminate solutions for creating a safety climate in an organization by minimizing accidents at the workplace through increasing safety awareness among employees. For this purpose, a survey was carried out to collect the data by means of questionnaires from different marble factories situated in industrial areas of Mardan and Nowshera Districts of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Pakistan. Total one hundred questionnaires were distributed among the employees, out of which eighty five were returned, which were considered enough for analyzing the data. Data were analyzed though SPSS version 20. The empirical results showed that environmental conditions, safety related policies and programs, organizational climates, and safety communications were significantly affecting safety climate, and safety climate was highly related to the employee’s performance. On the basis of empirical findings of this study, it is concluded that better environmental conditions, safety related policies, organizational climates and safety communications should be ensured and practiced in marble factories situated in industrial zones of Mardan and Nowshera Districts of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Pakistan for creating the safety climate in order to enhance the safety related performance of the employees.Â

Occupant injury severities in hybrid-vehicle involved crashes: A random parameters approach with heterogeneity in means and variances

Differences in hybrid and non-hybrid vehicle design, and potential differences in driver-related behavior among owners of these vehicle types, can potentially have interesting implications for safety-related policies. To study possible differences in hybrid and non-hybrid occupant injury severities in motor vehicle crashes, this paper uses a sample of hybrid-vehicle-involved crashes and estimates a mixed logit model of the resulting injury level of the most severely injured occupant in the crash, while accounting for possible heterogeneity in the means and variances of model parameters. A total of 2015 crashes in Washington State, involving at least one hybrid vehicle in the 5-year period from January 1, 2006 to December 31, 2010 were analyzed. The data included crash information regarding occupants, vehicles, environmental conditions at the time of the crash, hybrid and non-hybrid vehicle attributes, crash-contributing circumstances for both hybrid and non-hybrid involved vehicles, collision type and crash location information relating to intersections, functional class of the highway, and highway curvature. Model estimation results show that a wide range of variables influence the most severely injured occupant, and that the number-of-occupants parameter and the intersection-location indicator parameter are random with significant heterogeneity in both means and variances. Sources of heterogeneity include the ratio of hybrid to non-hybrid vehicle counts in the crash, vehicle weight to horsepower ratio range (maximum difference in ratio) for the crash, number of adult occupants aged 41–64years, functional class, and vehicle type interactions. The results further demonstrate the potential of models that address unobserved heterogeneity to unravel important relationships in the analysis of highway injury severities.

Occupational Exposures of Home Healthcare Workers.

Population demographics in the United States are rapidly changing with increased dependence on home healthcare (HHC) by an aging population, patients suffering from chronic diseases, and inability to perform activities of daily living. Despite the occupational injury rates for HHC workers (HHCW) being higher than the national average, an understanding of the occupational safety and health experiences and exposures of HHCW is limited. The purpose of this study was to understand the health and safety risk factors for HHCW. One-on-one interviews were conducted with HHCW to elicit frequency of daily occupational exposures to hazards and risk factors during visits to patients' homes. Approximately 67% of the study population was over 40 years old and mostly obese, potentially increasing risk for injury. HHCW routinely perform physical tasks with increased risk for occupational musculoskeletal injuries. Exposures to drug residue from dispensing oral medications and anticancer medications and exposure to potentially infectious agents and cleaning chemicals used for infection prevention were reported. The majority of HHCW were also exposed to secondhand smoke and occasionally experienced violence. Developing and implementing intervention strategies that address engineering controls, establish employee safety-related policies, provide training and retraining, promote a healthy lifestyle among HHCW, and providing suitable personal protective equipment may help to decrease occupational injury rates.

Complexity of occupational exposures for home health-care workers: nurses vs. home health aides.

To identify occupational exposures for home health-care nurses and aides. Home health-care workers' occupational injury rates in the USA are higher than the national average, yet research on causative exposures and hazards is limited. Participants were interviewed about annual frequency of occupational exposures and hazards. Exposure and hazard means were compared between home health-care nurses and aides using a Wilcoxon two-sample test. A majority of the sample was over 40years old and obese, potentially increasing injury risks. Home health-care nurses performed more clinical tasks, increasing exposure to blood-borne pathogens. Home health-care aides performed more physical tasks with risk for occupational musculoskeletal injuries. They also dispensed oral medications and anti-cancer medications, and were exposed to drug residue at a frequency comparable to home health-care nurses. Both groups were exposed to occupational second-hand smoke. Establishing employee safety-related policies, promoting healthy lifestyle among staff, and making engineered tools readily available to staff can assist in decreasing exposures and hazards. Implications for nursing management include implementation of health-promotion programmes, strategies to reduce exposure to second-hand smoke, ensuring access to and education on assistive and safety devices, and education for all staff on protection against drug residue.

Injury severity analysis: comparison of multilevel logistic regression models and effects of collision data aggregation

This paper describes an empirical study aiming at identifying the main differences between different logistic regression models and collision data aggregation methods that are commonly applied in road safety literature for modeling collision severity. In particular, the research compares three popular multilevel logistic models (i.e., sequential binary logit models, ordered logit models, and multinomial logit models) as well as three data aggregation methods (i.e., occupant based, vehicle based, and collision based). Six years of collision data (2001–2006) from 31 highway routes from across the province of Ontario, Canada were used for this analysis. It was found that a multilevel multinomial logit model has the best fit to the data than the other two models while the results obtained from occupant-based data are more reliable than those from vehicle- and collision-based data. More importantly, while generally consistent in terms of factors that were found to be significant between different models and data aggregation methods, the effect size of each factor differ substantially, which could have significant implications for evaluating the effects of different safety-related policies and countermeasures.

The effect of extratropical cyclone weather conditions on fishing vessel incidents’ severity level in Atlantic Canada

Fishing is one of the most dangerous occupations in the world. In addition to the high risk of fatality, fish harvesters are also at risk of a wide range of non-fatal injuries during their work at sea. Weather factors are an intrinsic part of fish harvesters’ operating environment and they consider the most dangerous situations at sea to be associated with weather-related factors. This research aims to answer questions regarding the effects of extratropical cyclone weather conditions on the severity level of maritime incidents to provide more insight for fish harvesters and/or marine traffic decision makers such as the Canadian Coast Guard. To achieve these goals, weather and incident data in Atlantic Canadian waters were matched spatially and temporally then analyzed to explore their relationships. Logistic Regression was used to examine how weather factors affect the severity level of fishing vessel incidents. Ice concentration, wind speed, sea surface temperature, and darkness were the most significant environmental factors with respect to severity level of fishing incidents. When only incidents associated with cyclones were taken into consideration, Laplacian of pressure as an indicator of cyclone’s intensity replaced ice concentration as a significant factor. Logistic Regression was also applied for individual fishery types, revealing that distinct fisheries can be affected by different weather factors. Improving our understanding of extreme events and revising safety related policies in commercial fishing is particularly important under climate change scenarios as fish harvesters’ reliance on traditional weather patterns becomes increasingly questionable.

The impact of alcohol and road traffic policies on crash rates in Botswana, 2004–2011: A time-series analysis

In Botswana, increased development and motorization have brought increased road traffic-related death rates. Between 1981 and 2001, the road traffic-related death rate in Botswana more than tripled. The country has taken several steps over the last several years to address the growing burden of road traffic crashes and particularly to address the burden of alcohol-related crashes. This study examines the impact of the implementation of alcohol and road safety-related policies on crash rates, including overall crash rates, fatal crash rates, and single-vehicle nighttime fatal (SVNF) crash rates, in Botswana from 2004 to 2011. The overall crash rate declined significantly in June 2009 and June 2010, such that the overall crash rate from June 2010 to December 2011 was 22% lower than the overall crash rate from January 2004 to May 2009. Additionally, there were significant declines in average fatal crash and SVNF crash rates in early 2010. Botswana's recent crash rate reductions occurred during a time when aggressive policies and other activities (e.g., education, enforcement) were implemented to reduce alcohol consumption and improve road safety. While it is unclear which of the policies or activities contributed to these declines and to what extent, these reductions are likely the result of several, combined efforts.