In the Netherlands, approximately 2.300 workers have a serious reportable accident at work every year, of which around 60 are fatal (Inspectie SZW, 2020; Bellamy et al., 2014). Safety practitioners employ many methods to improve occupational safety for workers within their companies. Interventions might, for example, be aimed at improving companies’ overall ‘safety culture’, at the introduction of a safety management system (e.g. Robson et al., 2007), or at improving the compliance of workers to specific safety rules (e.g. Peuscher and Groeneweg 2012; Bryden et al., 2016). However, the effectiveness of many of those interventions remains largely unclear (Dyreborg et al, 2015). The Dutch National Institute for Public Health and the Environment (RIVM) has started a project with the ultimate goal of developing a database filled with effective safety interventions. Developers can submit their interventions using a fixed protocol. To support this project, we developed a survey, which was sent to all members of the Dutch Society for Safety Science (NVVK). In the survey, we used a list of 48 predefined descriptions of common interventions. Respondents could indicate whether they made use of these common interventions and the extent to which they considered these effective. The survey thus provided an extensive overview of the use and perceived effectiveness of 48 specific safety interventions. In the future, these insights can support the development and testing of more effective safety interventions.@en

Quantitative Risk Analysis (QRA) is a standard tool in some high-risk industries (such as the on- and offshore exploration and production and chemical industry). Presently, existing knowledge concerning human error likelihood and human reliability assessment is insufficiently represented in QRAs. In this paper we attempt to implement the quantification of the human factors in a QRA, which we call QRA+. We analysed a specific incident scenario: the risk of overfilling chemical storage tanks that operate at atmospheric pressure. This scenario was chosen because it is a relevant example of a high-risk scenario in the chemical industry. We identified relevant technological and human parameters within this scenario through on-site visits and interviews with site-experts. The quantitative knowledge concerning the technological parameters was obtained from officially documented SIL statistics, whereas the Standardized Plant Analysis Risk-Human Reliability analysis (SPAR-H) was used to quantify the human factors. Beta distributions were used to model failure probability distributions to account for the uncertainty inherent in dealing with human reliability. For seamless integration of existing qualitative and quantitative knowledge, we made use of a Bayesian Belief Network. The resulting model provides an integrated and more accurate estimation of the failure probabilities for both technological and human factors and the uncertainty surrounding such probability estimates. Furthermore, it gives insight in where these failure probabilities originate and how they interact. This will allow companies to identify those parameters they need to influence to get optimal results concerning their management of risk.

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Although major hazard industries have no legal obligations to demonstrate a good safety culture, it is an increasingly important factor for risk-based inspections. This paper describes the development and evaluation of a relatively simple method for external indicative assessment of the process safety culture in major hazard industries. As a first step, a tool was developed. Second, the tool was successfully tested in a workshop with major hazard inspectors. After this ‘proof of concept’ and a few adaptations to improve the tool, quantitative evaluation and validation were carried out with a representative sample of major hazard inspectors in the Netherlands. In this stage, the tool comprised 30 questions, of which 19 sufficiently frequent valid responses were given for the validity test. The evaluations demonstrate that without specific preparations, inspection teams can use the tool to discriminate between plants with poor or good safety cultures. That is sufficient for ranking as additional input for risk-based inspection strategies. The resulting indicative ‘scores’ for safety culture correlate meaningfully with the quality of process safety management systems and the number of (legal) non-compliances, which were identified by the inspection team at the same occasion. The use of the tool can be further improved by training inspectors, making minor adaptations of the inspection process, and broadening the scope of a few questions. It is expected that external assessments of safety culture will become increasingly important not only for inspectorates, but also for a range of other external stakeholders.

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In The Netherlands, approximately 2.300 workers have a serious reportable accident at work every year, of which around 60 are fatal (Bellamy et al., 2014). Safety professionals employ many methods to improve safety for workers within their companies. Interventions might, for example, be aimed at improving companies’ overall ‘safety culture’, at the introduction of a safety management system (e.g. Robson et al., 2007), or at improving the compliance of workers to specific safety rules (e.g. Peuscher and Groeneweg 2012; Bryden et al., 2016). The effectiveness of many of those interventions remains however largely unclear (Dyreborg et al, 2015). The Dutch National Institute for Public Health and the Environment (RIVM) has started a project with the ultimate goal of developing a database filled with ‘effective safety interventions’. The interventions can be submitted by their developers using a fixed protocol. To support this project, a survey was developed, which was sent to all members of the Dutch Society for Safety Science (NVVK). In the survey, a list of 48 predefined descriptions of common interventions was used. Respondents indicated whether they made use of these common interventions and the extent to which they considered these effective. The survey thus provided an extensive overview of the use and perceived effectiveness of 48 specific safety interventions. In the near future, these insights can support the development and testing of more effective safety interventions.

@en

Background
Organisations spend a considerable amount of time and effort on diagnosing and analysing risks within their organisation. In the area of occupational and process safety, a myriad of employee survey instruments is available. Many studies show that operational processes play an important role in an organisations overall safety. Yet, so far safety surveys mainly focus on safety measures or operational safety processes. A flexible instrument was developed with which a wide variety of constructs, from different disciplines, can be measured in a consistent and practical way. The resulting survey distinguishes itself from existing safety surveys by extending the scope with the operational processes which are also referred to as the ‘Core Business’.
Study
This study reports on the development of a catalogue of constructs which were derived from scientific literature and practice. Each of these constructs has been developed with a view towards measurability in an employee survey. The reliability and validity for fifteen of these constructs was assessed. Five separate projects have been conducted within a range of organisations operating as high risk industries.
Results
Construct validity and the dimensional structure of the instrument have been established through exploratory factor analysis and confirmed through confirmatory factor analysis. Diverse aspects derived from motivational and ergonomic approaches to safety proved to be distinguishable in this analysis.
Conclusion
The described instrument allows the mapping and quantification of various aspects of the operational process that are, based on existing knowledge, related to the occurrence of incidents.@en