A Reflective Account on Managing Health and Safety Culture at Work

This reflective account delves into the critical aspects of managing health and safety culture within an organization, particularly from a healthcare manager's perspective. It highlights the importance of integrating safety into all facets of the workplace, including equipment, environment, and employee behavior. The reflection covers the manager's feelings and evaluations regarding the challenges of influencing safety culture, emphasizing the need for a gradual and comprehensive approach. It analyzes key elements of a positive safety culture, such as effective hazard control, positive attitudes towards compliance, and continuous learning from incidents. The account concludes with specific actions plans for improving the organization's safety climate, including assessing the current climate, demonstrating leadership in safety, and engaging employees in safety training and communication. The document emphasizes the role of senior management commitment and employee involvement in fostering a safer and healthier working environment. Desklib provides this document and other study resources for students.

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Reflective Account

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Table of Contents
Description.......................................................................................................................................3
Feelings............................................................................................................................................3
Evaluation........................................................................................................................................4
Analysis...........................................................................................................................................4
Conclusions (General).....................................................................................................................5
Conclusions (Specific).....................................................................................................................5
Personal action plans.......................................................................................................................5
References List................................................................................................................................7

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Description
In the contemporary world, it is now recognized that the management of health and safety should
grasp the interactions between the working equipment, environment, procedures and systems as
well as the organization’s people in a complete manner (Spector, 2002). The values and attitudes
of an organization towards with respect to the safe working are crucial factors which impact its
approach of working and consequently its safety and health performance. A culture which
consists of shared values that are important and the beliefs in the context of which things work
and which interact with the structure of an organization and control systems for the production of
behavioral standards, is known as the safety culture (Pidgeon, 1991). A safety and health culture
which is poor is more likely to lead towards weaknesses caused because of issues of an
individual's work interface and also because of poor communication and training (Nieva and
Sorra, 2003).
An atmosphere or environment where non-compliance with the practices of safe working is
acceptable and it does not assist an organization in taking effective action for solving the safety
and health related issues, is encouraged by a poor culture (Cox and Cheyne, 2000). It often
happens that health organizations which have an unsound safety culture can have the same kind
of attitude towards all of their procedures and processes. This can result in to poor financial
control and product quality as well as poor safety and health of the organization.
Feelings
As a Healthcare manager, to me a real challenge is how to have a positive impact on the safety
and health culture of my organization. According to me, it is difficult for changing the beliefs
and attitudes of the work force just by direct persuasion; however by means of acting safely the
safe thinking can be started by the workers. Such a belief has led to the establishment of
approaches related to be a behavioral safety. We should always remember that often, culture is
developed slowly and adequate amount of time is required for fundamental changes (Mearns and
Flin, 1999). The professionals of safety and health must aim at applying current thinking in a
way that is practical for the achievement of safer and healthier working environments.

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Evaluation
By the means of this reflective learning, I was able to evaluate that the connection between poor
practices at the workplace and consequent poor health can be less enforceable and clear than the
ones that are related to bad safety conditions and consequent injuries. Issues of culture which are
linked to work-related health undeniably have greater importance than the ones which affect the
workplace safety (Parker, Lawrie and Hudson, 2006). Way of doing things which is taught,
copied or shared is known as culture. Every individual that belongs to a specific culture tends to
do things in a similar manner that would usually be considered to be a norm by them. Hence, the
safety culture of an organization includes its practices of shared working, its tendency of
tolerating and accepting risks, its way of controlling hazards as well as its ways of dealing with
near misses and accidents (Choudhry, Fang and Mohamed, 2007). Another description of safety
culture implies that it is a combination of the way people feel regarding safety, the actual things
done by them and the procedures and policies possessed by an organization.
Analysis
There are usually three key elements of a positive safety culture. These are - working rules and
practices for the effective control of hazards; a positive attitude towards the compliance with and
risk management of the control procedures; and the capacity of learning from near misses,
accidents and indicators of safety performance in bringing about consistent improvement
(Vecchio-Sadus and Griffiths, 2004). Certain standards of safe working practices can be
established and developed by an organization which would comply with the best practices as
well as the law. Being a Healthcare manager of the organization, my focus would be to create a
positive attitude towards compliance by ensuring that all the senior managers along with me read
from the front with respect to this. However, in order to ensure the above elements work
effectively, I would need to make my organization learn and understand from the things that take
place within the organization. This can be done by analyzing the near misses an accident and
being aware of the same as it can make it possible for developing significant improvement
towards practices of safe working. I would also need to implement honest and credible
inspections of safety generate reports so that me and other managers are able to know and
understand where we need to concentrate our efforts. It is important for us to include the near
misses in such an analysis since maximum organizations have reports of injuries and poor health

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which are very low for being used as an improvement plan basis. One of the best ways of
engaging groups and individuals in the development and promotion of a positive safety culture
are - changing the way we think for creating new possibilities, implementing rounding and
regular check-ins and focusing on stronger leadership (Neal and Griffin, 2006).
Conclusions (General)
Culture of an organization is the foundation office success and sustainability in the long-term,
however, changing the culture of the organization can prove to be challenging. By the means of
beginning with leadership, imp integration across the organization and its processes as well as
the workforce, and by adopting positive thinking the workplace culture of an organization can be
improved to one which increases the overall productivity and is more enjoyable to work in.
Conclusions (Specific)
It is not easy to achieve alterations within the safety and health culture of an organization. The
plans and procedures for the improvement of an existing culture would need to understand that
evolving over a long period of time is needed for the same. There are high chances for a culture
change program to be unsuccessful unless the senior managers commit themselves towards
bringing and leading the change. I found that if I tried to change my organizations culture too
quickly, I might be generating resistance towards the same. Even though it is true that a culture's
direction comes from the senior managers, it is equally important to consider other influential
people such as the organization's workforce; all these people can be the key for the engagement
in the improvement of a safety culture.
Personal action plans
After undertaking the reflective assessment, as a healthcare manager, I would implement a
specific way of identification which would be the assessment of my present safety climate. I
would be required to improve my organization’s safety and health culture. I would also need to
demonstrate a certain degree of leadership in safety and health and would need to commit myself
into demonstrating safe and healthy working. For this, I would be requiring to make close
contact with the workforce. I would need to ascertain how much my employees understand and
communicate about safety and health, and determine their level of commitment and reliability

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towards attending safety and health training session. I would assume that the employees are
unaware regarding the organizational safety measures and for conducting the induction, I would
collect employee information from the departmental heads and the human resource manager. In
order to understand the knowledge of the departments regarding the safety policies, I would
communicate the department heads. I would work on receiving necessary feedback from the
employees which would help me I understanding their knowledge of the safety procedures and
policies.

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References List
Choudhry, R.M., Fang, D. and Mohamed, S., 2007. The nature of safety culture: A survey of the
state-of-the-art. Safety science, 45(10), pp.993-1012.
Cox, S.J. and Cheyne, A.J.T., 2000. Assessing safety culture in offshore environments. Safety
science, 34(1-3), pp.111-129.
Mearns, K.J. and Flin, R., 1999. Assessing the state of organizational safety—culture or
climate?. Current Psychology, 18(1), pp.5-17.
Neal, A. and Griffin, M.A., 2006. A study of the lagged relationships among safety climate,
safety motivation, safety behavior, and accidents at the individual and group levels. Journal of
applied psychology, 91(4), p.946.
Nieva, V.F. and Sorra, J., 2003. Safety culture assessment: a tool for improving patient safety in
healthcare organizations. BMJ Quality & Safety, 12(suppl 2), pp.ii17-ii23.
Parker, D., Lawrie, M. and Hudson, P., 2006. A framework for understanding the development
of organisational safety culture. Safety science, 44(6), pp.551-562.
Pidgeon, N.F., 1991. Safety culture and risk management in organizations. Journal of cross-
cultural psychology, 22(1), pp.129-140.
Spector, R.E., 2002. Cultural diversity in health and illness. Journal of Transcultural
Nursing, 13(3), pp.197-199.
Vecchio-Sadus, A.M. and Griffiths, S., 2004. Marketing strategies for enhancing safety
culture. Safety Science, 42(7), pp.601-619.