Safety engineers and accident prevention

Abstract

Menckel, E., 1990. Safety engineers and accident prevention: An inventory of activities within one industrial sector in Sweden. Journal of Occupational Accidents, 12: 271–282.

An inventory has been taken of the accident prevention work of safety engineers at slaughter-houses and in the meat industry; this is the sector in Sweden which shows the highest number of accidents per million working hours. All safety engineers within occupational health services associated with companies in this sector filled in a questionnaire on their safety prevention work that covered both all the companies and the particular slaughter-house/meat industry companies for which they had responsibility. Interviews were also conducted with approximately half of the safety engineers. The results reveal, among other things, that accident-oriented work comprised only a minor part of the work of safety engineers, most often taking up less than 5% of their total working time. Many had not worked with accidents/accident risks at slaughter-house and meat industry companies at all. Factors considered by the engineers to be obstacles to accident prevention work were that their own area of responsibility was far too wide, that there was a lack of initiative and low level of interest on the part of company management and trade union organizations, and that the training of work supervisors and safety representatives was inadequate. On the basis of the results, a number of recommendations are made with respect to both changes in the nature of the work of engineers to provide more opportunities for accident prevention and the development of cooperative activities to promote more effective accident prevention work.