In spite of the vast technological progress and improvement in the standard of management systems within hazardous industries around the world, occupational health and safety incidents and fatalities continue to devastate thousands of lives each year. Throughout the last decade, significant improvement has been achieved in the reduction of health and safety incident rates across the South African petrochemical environment. However, a persistent roller-coaster fatality rate still prevails. Recent studies have shown that in order to conquer the relentless battle in realizing sustainable world-class health and safety performance, an organisation has to move beyond the traditional compliance orientated safety focus towards an interdependent safety culture in which safety is ubiquitous and embedded in the hearts of all employees. The root causes of more and more occupational health and safety incidents are no longer as a result of mechanical or systems failure, but instead originate from the attitude, values and beliefs of management and employees with regard to the significance of safety, also known as the safety culture. This has ignited a rising interest in the concept of safety culture among organisations because of the positive impact on occupational health and safety in reducing the potential for fatalities, injuries and workplace incidents. Hence the primary objective of this study is to determine the maturity of the current safety culture in the South African petrochemical environment by identifying particular culture shortfalls which could lead to hesitant progress towards the desired interdependent state. In order to reach this objective, three secondary objectives have also been set. Firstly, an understanding of the concept of organisational culture and safety culture is crucial. In simple terms, organisational culture can be described as the shared values, assumptions and beliefs in an organisation that ultimately direct employee behaviour. Organisational culture is characterised by three layers known as artefacts, espoused values and basic assumptions. These layers represent the manifestation of the organisational culture and vary in terms of outward visibility and resistance to change. Understanding and analysing these layers provide the reasons why employees behave in certain ways. Safety culture is a subset of organisational culture; in other words, it is the manifestation of the organisation?s attitude, values and commitment in regard to the importance of health and safety. Companies which have developed effective safety cultures have demonstrated unequivocal results in closing the elusive health and safety performance gap. Secondly, the fundamental components conducive of an effective safety culture were explored. These components include management and employee commitment to health and safety, accountability and involvement, communication and trust, risk awareness and compliance, competency and learning and finally recognition. Most of the components can be assigned to the artefact level or a combination of the level of artefacts and espoused values with only a small number more appropriately associated with the level of basic assumptions. The effectiveness within each of these areas ultimately dictates the nature of the safety culture and the success in preventing health and safety incidents. The focus of the last secondary objective was to determine the development stages leading to an effective safety culture known as an interdependent safety culture. Each of these stages represents the degree of maturity of the attitudes and commitment of management and employees in relation to the ongoing health and safety improvement in the organisation. The DuPont model suggests that in a reactive safety culture, safety is merely a natural instinct with no real perceived value for the individual or organisation. Moving towards a dependent safety culture, employees start to value safety but only so they do not get caught. The next stage called an independent safety culture is characterised by self preservation. In this stage, the mindset of employees changed towards an attitude of ?I do things safe so I do not get hurt?. In the final stage known as interdependent safety culture, employees embrace safety as a personal virtue not only for their own safety but also in contribution to the safety of their peers. In such a culture it is employees? desire to do things safely so that no-one gets hurt. An empirical study was conducted through a quantitative research approach in the form of a safety climate questionnaire. The target population consisted of first-line managers and non-managerial personnel within the production; maintenance; laboratory; technical, and the safety, health and environment departments in a petrochemical organisation. In light of the results emanating from the empirical study it can be concluded that an overall positive perception was observed towards the selected safety culture components indicative through the mean response scores above the neutral scale of 3. Older and more experienced employees demonstrated a more positive response to the safety compared to younger employees. However, several distinctive safety culture shortcomings were also identified. In the current safety culture, health and safety is sometimes overlooked due to productivity or cost implications. Employees tend to withhold safety related information to themselves as a culture of guilt prevails and mere compliance to safety standards is considered adequate. Solutions to health and safety problems are most of a short-term nature and do not address the root cause. It therefore provides evidence that the organisation under evaluation has not yet reached the desired safety culture maturity stage of interdependence. Although the study population is limited to a single organisation, the shortfalls identified could relate to the larger petrochemical environment and thus could explain the recent fluctuating health and safety performance. This assumption, however, can only be validated through further research within a much greater sample size inclusive of more than one organisation in the petrochemical environment. It is thus clear that the existing safety culture within the petrochemical organisation could lead to potential health and safety incidents if the shortcomings are not appropriately addressed. / Thesis (M.B.A.)--North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2011.

<p> Several lines of evidence suggest that pigs act as a reservoir of hepatitis E virus (HEV). This dissertation presents data from studies conducted from August 2010 &ndash; August 2011 in Nan, Thailand. These studies define the previously unknown burden of HEV in pig and human populations in Nan province, and evaluate the transmission of HEV among humans having direct or indirect contact with the reservoir in pig. This work begins with a literature review. The first study addressed the risks for HEV transmission between pigs in different sized farms, and possible risk factors among pigs in a cross-sectional study. This study found a 9.9% (87/879) seroprevalence of anti-HEV among pigs and 2.9% of pigs had HEV ribonucleic acid (RNA) positive fecal samples. All HEV sequences corresponded to genotype 3. Pigs raised on medium sized farms with 30-300 pigs per farm had higher anti-HEV seroprevalence than pigs raised on larger farms with over 300 pigs after controlling for other potential confounders. Better hygienic practices were used in larger farms compared with small or medium sized farms. The second study addressed the association between occupational pig exposure to HEV infection among farmers over the age of 15 and the general population without direct contact with pigs in a cross-sectional study. The overall prevalence of anti-HEV was 23.0% (118/513). There was no association between anti-HEV prevalence and direct exposure to pigs. Frequent consumption of organ meat &ge; 2 times per week was a significant risk factor for HEV seroprevalence, adjusted odds ratio (OR) 3.23, 95% confidence interval (CI) 1.15, 9.01. Serum samples from all subjects with recent symptoms compatible with hepatitis who were IgM anti-HEV positive among the farmers and 40 serum samples from the control unexposed group with the highest mean optical density (OD) value were evaluated for HEV RNA by reverse transcriptase polymerase chain reaction (RT PCR). None of the samples were HEV RNA positive. These studies establish that HEV is endemic among pig populations in Nan province. It appears that HEV infections in humans are acquired more frequently as a food-borne infection than by direct contact with pigs in this population. </p>

In spite of the vast technological progress and improvement in the standard of management systems within hazardous industries around the world, occupational health and safety incidents and fatalities continue to devastate thousands of lives each year. Throughout the last decade, significant improvement has been achieved in the reduction of health and safety incident rates across the South African petrochemical environment. However, a persistent roller-coaster fatality rate still prevails. Recent studies have shown that in order to conquer the relentless battle in realizing sustainable world-class health and safety performance, an organisation has to move beyond the traditional compliance orientated safety focus towards an interdependent safety culture in which safety is ubiquitous and embedded in the hearts of all employees. The root causes of more and more occupational health and safety incidents are no longer as a result of mechanical or systems failure, but instead originate from the attitude, values and beliefs of management and employees with regard to the significance of safety, also known as the safety culture. This has ignited a rising interest in the concept of safety culture among organisations because of the positive impact on occupational health and safety in reducing the potential for fatalities, injuries and workplace incidents. Hence the primary objective of this study is to determine the maturity of the current safety culture in the South African petrochemical environment by identifying particular culture shortfalls which could lead to hesitant progress towards the desired interdependent state. In order to reach this objective, three secondary objectives have also been set. Firstly, an understanding of the concept of organisational culture and safety culture is crucial. In simple terms, organisational culture can be described as the shared values, assumptions and beliefs in an organisation that ultimately direct employee behaviour. Organisational culture is characterised by three layers known as artefacts, espoused values and basic assumptions. These layers represent the manifestation of the organisational culture and vary in terms of outward visibility and resistance to change. Understanding and analysing these layers provide the reasons why employees behave in certain ways. Safety culture is a subset of organisational culture; in other words, it is the manifestation of the organisation?s attitude, values and commitment in regard to the importance of health and safety. Companies which have developed effective safety cultures have demonstrated unequivocal results in closing the elusive health and safety performance gap. Secondly, the fundamental components conducive of an effective safety culture were explored. These components include management and employee commitment to health and safety, accountability and involvement, communication and trust, risk awareness and compliance, competency and learning and finally recognition. Most of the components can be assigned to the artefact level or a combination of the level of artefacts and espoused values with only a small number more appropriately associated with the level of basic assumptions. The effectiveness within each of these areas ultimately dictates the nature of the safety culture and the success in preventing health and safety incidents. The focus of the last secondary objective was to determine the development stages leading to an effective safety culture known as an interdependent safety culture. Each of these stages represents the degree of maturity of the attitudes and commitment of management and employees in relation to the ongoing health and safety improvement in the organisation. The DuPont model suggests that in a reactive safety culture, safety is merely a natural instinct with no real perceived value for the individual or organisation. Moving towards a dependent safety culture, employees start to value safety but only so they do not get caught. The next stage called an independent safety culture is characterised by self preservation. In this stage, the mindset of employees changed towards an attitude of ?I do things safe so I do not get hurt?. In the final stage known as interdependent safety culture, employees embrace safety as a personal virtue not only for their own safety but also in contribution to the safety of their peers. In such a culture it is employees? desire to do things safely so that no-one gets hurt. An empirical study was conducted through a quantitative research approach in the form of a safety climate questionnaire. The target population consisted of first-line managers and non-managerial personnel within the production; maintenance; laboratory; technical, and the safety, health and environment departments in a petrochemical organisation. In light of the results emanating from the empirical study it can be concluded that an overall positive perception was observed towards the selected safety culture components indicative through the mean response scores above the neutral scale of 3. Older and more experienced employees demonstrated a more positive response to the safety compared to younger employees. However, several distinctive safety culture shortcomings were also identified. In the current safety culture, health and safety is sometimes overlooked due to productivity or cost implications. Employees tend to withhold safety related information to themselves as a culture of guilt prevails and mere compliance to safety standards is considered adequate. Solutions to health and safety problems are most of a short-term nature and do not address the root cause. It therefore provides evidence that the organisation under evaluation has not yet reached the desired safety culture maturity stage of interdependence. Although the study population is limited to a single organisation, the shortfalls identified could relate to the larger petrochemical environment and thus could explain the recent fluctuating health and safety performance. This assumption, however, can only be validated through further research within a much greater sample size inclusive of more than one organisation in the petrochemical environment. It is thus clear that the existing safety culture within the petrochemical organisation could lead to potential health and safety incidents if the shortcomings are not appropriately addressed. / Thesis (M.B.A.)--North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2011.

Globally, hundreds of thousands of people subsist by informally collecting, sorting, and selling materials recovered from disposed solid waste. For most individuals this informal activity is precarious and prone to job insecurity, stigmatization, exploitation, physical danger, and emotional distress. In order to understand how informal recyclers perceive their health and hazards, data were collected over a six-month period in 2010, in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Through a political ecology framework, the authors relate the systemic and exploitative structures that continue to negatively influence the health of the recyclers. The authors demonstrate that independent informal recyclers face a number of multifaceted health implications that are directly related to the unregulated and undervalued collection of solid waste. Recyclers are either uninformed or indifferent about policy interventions, such as accessing free personal protective equipment. The article concludes by suggesting specific measures supported by the academic literature on inclusive waste management and social networks, advocating an emphasis on cooperativism as a means of creating a space for workplace health promotion and access to resources. / Graduate

A deficient safety culture has been implicated in a number of organisational accidents from a range of high hazard industries. Despite its implications for safety, many questions about safety culture remain unanswered. In order to contribute to the literature on this topic, this thesis set out to investigate the role of trust in safety culture. The oil and gas industry was chosen as the context for study due to the hazardous nature of its work, the industry’s focus on continuous improvement in safety performance and the interest shown by oil companies in participating in safety research. Leading models of safety culture have stressed the importance of trust in developing and maintaining patterns of safe behaviours at work. This thesis proposed a new model of safety culture based on dual attitudes about trust. This model states that explicit attitudes about trust are part of safety climate and that implicit attitudes about trust comprise some of the basic underlying assumptions that are the deepest level of safety culture. In order to test this model, this thesis developed a method to measure implicit attitudes about trust in an industrial setting. Using this method, two studies of dual attitudes about trust were conducted at different UK gas plants. In both of these studies, different patterns of results were found for measures of explicit and implicit attitudes about trust for workmates, supervisors and the plant leadership, respectively. These findings support the proposed model suggest that explicit and implicit attitudes about trust are separate constructs that may influence different types of safety behaviours.  Positive relationships were found between measures of explicit attitudes about trust and self-report items about safety behaviours like reporting incidents and challenging unsafe acts.  These findings were taken as a step toward validating the proposed model.

Considering the increasing levels of unemployment and underemployment, and the limited evidence concerning the impact of underemployment on health, my study examines the relations between subjective, objective, and time-related underemployment and employees’ health-related quality of life, as manifested through self-rated health, activity limitations and work-related stress. The study compares an expanded model of work-health relations that, along with the factors addressed by control-demand, and social capital theories, includes characteristics of the physical work environment, and employees’ economic class. In addition to the commonly examined factors related to employment and health (control-demand and social capital), my study explores the impact of the work environment (hazards, discomfort and physical demands) and economic class to determine the specific effects of underemployment on an employee’s health-related quality of life. My main argument is that underemployment, in conjunction with lower economic class, higher exposure to a harmful work environment, lack of control over work, and lower social capital, contributes to increased work-related stress and diminishes health-related quality of life. The study applies a mixed methodological approach based on data from the Canadian Work and Lifelong Learning Survey and the US General Social Survey, and qualitative analysis of interviews from the Ontario Survey on Education-Job Requirements Matching. Evidence based on cross-sectional and qualitative data analysis provides consistent findings and confirms the main assumption that high levels of underemployment have a significant effect on employees’ health-related quality of life. The study shows that employees’ economic class, characteristics of work environment and control over work carry the highest associations with health-related quality of life, while underemployment has a significant additive association with health-related quality of life, most importantly with work-related stress.

The occupational environment has been a fruitful source of research on causes of cancer. Analyses in studies of occupational risk factors for cancer can experience problems if an attempt is made to model large numbers of exposures, some of which may be highly correlated. Typical analyses of such studies focus on one chemical at a time, but this may not adequately deal with mutual confounding. Based on a large study in Montreal, the objective of this thesis was twofold: to assess several occupational chemicals for their etiologic role in lung cancer, and to explore the use of semi-Bayes modeling to simultaneously estimate the effects of many chemicals at a time. Methods. Data came from a multiple-cancer case-control study of exposures in the work place. The study was comprised of 857 cases of lung cancer and 2172 controls consisting of patients with other types of cancer diagnosed from 1979 to 1985. Detailed occupational histories were collected and occupational hygienists translated these into exposure histories for 231 chemicals. All chemicals were analysed with conventional modeling strategies of both single and multiple parameter models. Of the 231 chemicals, 184 were singled out for analysis in a single large semi-Bayes model, which is a variant of classical empirical Bayes. This analysis is a fairly novel method suited to estimating large numbers of parameters in the face of sparse data. For the Bayesian portion of this model, chemicals were grouped by shared chemical and physical properties, based on the belief that these shared properties would imply similar effects on the risk of lung cancer. Results. Estimates for all 231 chemicals were derived under the various modeling strategies. For most chemicals, estimates changed little across these analytic approaches, though some differences were apparent. Of the 231 chemicals assessed, 53 were earmarked as requiring further evaluation and underwent additional analyses. Discussion. While semi-Bayes models have been shown previously to offer improved estimation over conventional analyses, the gains in using semi-Bayes models in the present study were less clear. Effort put into some portions of the Bayesian modeling did not materially influence the results. A number of chemicals were earmarked as potential lung carcinogens.

Thesis (M Nursing (Advanced Practice))--University of South Australia, 1996

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No description available.