Sustainable Occupational Safety and Health Interventions: A Study on the Factors for an Effective Design

Effective interventions are a priority in continuously changing occupational environments, particularly in companies struggling to manage health and safety in the workplace. Practitioners may consider practical solutions for Occupational Safety and Health (OSH) improvement as a panacea for all major problems. However, they may overlook a range of other factors that affect the success of such solutions. The way in which a solution is developed, designed, implemented, and evaluated determines its impact. Participatory interventions are one way of ensuring better results. Consequently, this study proposes a way of establishing sustainable, effective, and efficient interventions by defining the required processes and actively involving responsible actors (i.e., who, when, and how). A national OSH intervention for introducing a near-miss management system, funded by the Italian National Institute for Insurance against Accidents at Work (INAIL), is used as a reference because its development process includes an accurate design stage. Based on this intervention, a multistep design process is built to answer how (how the intervention will persist by defining the context, processes, and scenarios), who (who will be the responsible actors actively participating), and when (when actors will be involved) questions. The design process established for the intervention, although within a specific context, provides clues to discriminant factors that would enable effectiveness in general interventions, and the proposed system for near- miss management generates insights that may be generalizable to other OSH interventions developed in different environments.