Measuring Safety Climate-identifying the Significant Determinants

摘要

Hong Kong used to have a poor safety record. Research study reported that the annual accident rate per 1,000 workers in 1994 was twice that of the United States, 25 times worse than Japan and nearly 30 times worse than Singapore. However, remarkable progress has been made in promoting safety and health in the workplace through legislation, enforcement, promotion and training. Safety awareness of employers and employees has been enhanced which resulted in continued improvements in the overall safety performance in the past decade. The accident rate of the construction industry per 1,000 workers in 2001 was 114.6, lower than 149.8 in 2000 by 23.5%, 302. 3 in 1992 by 62.1% and the average of the past ten years (226.3) by 49.3%. The industrial fatality rate of the construction industry per 1,000 workers in 2001 was 0.349, lower than 0.364 in 2000 by 4.3%, 0.771 in 1992 by 54.8% and the average rate of the past ten years (0.728) by 52.1. Both the accident rate and the fatality rate were the lowest over the past ten years. Although the accident rate and fatality rate show a downward trend for the recent years, the rates of the construction industry in Hong Kong are still on the high side by international standard and by industry comparison. Previous research shows that there is a significant relationship between safety climate and safety work behavior. This further suggested that if safety characteristics are improved, a higher level of safety climate and performance will be resulted. The focus of this research is to study the impact of safety climate to safety performance. Definitions of relevant terms and the safety climate measuring tools will be reviewed. The initial result for the literature review suggests that the most important attributes used in assessing safety climate are organisational commitment (85.71% of the studies); followed by personal risk appreciation (78.57%), supervisor's commitment (64.29% ) and worker's competence (57.14%). A benchmark model for evaluating the level of safety performance of a construction project is envisaged to be developed as the primary deliverable in the next phase of this study.