Donato Masi

Developing, implementing and evaluating OSH interventions in SMEs: a pilot, exploratory study.

The literature on occupational safety and health (OSH) interventions contains many debates on how interventions should work, but far less attention has been paid to how they actually do work, and to the contextual factors that influence their implementation, development and effect. The need of improving the understanding of the OSH interventions issue is particularly relevant for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), since they experience worse OSH conditions, and have fewer physical, economic and organizational resources if compared to larger enterprises; thus, SMEs strongly need to focus their few resources in the decision-making process so as to select and put in place only the most proper interventions. This exploratory study is based on interviews with safety officers of 5 SMEs, and it gives an overview of the key features of the actual intervention process in SMEs and of the contextual factors making this actual intervention process similar or dissimilar to the ideal case. The results show how much qualitative and experience driven the actual intervention process is; they should be used to direct the future research towards an increasingly applicable one, to enable practitioners from SMEs to develop, implement and evaluate their OSH interventions in an “ideal” way.

Occupational Safety & Health (OSH) performance of SMEs: A structured framework

This paper deals with the use OSH factors for the correct identification and prioritization of OSH interventions especially within the Small and Medium sized Enterprises (SMEs) context, by taking into account the relevant OSH-factors. However, this should not be done on a one-to-one basis, but rather through a meaningful group of connected factors, which together impact on the OSH performance and on the overall performance. On the basis of the above, this paper aims at identifying the OSH-related factors and to work them into a structured framework, using a Focus Group approach. This framework explains each factor on the basis of a set of sub-factors, and clusters the factors into areas of affinity, thus creating three different levels of detail. Finally, the areas of affinity are worked into a hierarchical structure. The hierarchical structure and the three levels of detail are the tools enabling a rational planning of the interventions.

A review on models and practical methods for economic evaluation of Occupational Safety And Health (OSH)

The aim of this paper is to present a literature review on models and methods (tools) currently available for economic evaluations of OSH. The work methodology involved a search through international databases and science search-engines, as well as examining citations from other authors. This scrutiny allowed establishing the state of the art in this field. As a result, relevant features of current approaches are characterized here and some methodological limitations in this domain are briefly discussed; emphasis is put on the particular needs of Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs). The main contribution of this review is that it constitutes an up-to-date platform from where to launch new developments and improvements in this research area.