Guide to Evaluating the Effectiveness of Strategies for Preventing Work Injuries

Our aim in this book is to provide students, researchers and practitioners with the tools and concepts required to conduct systematic evaluations of injury prevention initiatives and safety programs. Successful evaluations will advance the discipline of occupational safety by building a body of knowledge, based on scientific evidence, that can be applied confidently in the workplace. This knowledge will provide a solid foundation for good safety practice, as well as inform the development of standards and regulations. Building such a knowledge base will help practitioners avoid the temptation of adopting safety procedures simply because they appear “intuitively obvious” when no scientific evidence actually exists for those practices.
Users of the guide are encouraged to demonstrate the strongest level of evidence available for an intervention by measuring the effect on safety outcomes in an experimental design. Even when this level of evidence is not obtained, much useful information can still be gained by following the recommendations in the book. In doing so, the safety field will become current with other disciplines, such as clinical medicine, where evaluation information is increasingly available and allows for evidence-based decision- making.
We hope that this guide will assist safety specialists to meet the challenge of effectiveness evaluations. Please let us know if you found it useful by completing the evaluation form provided at the end to the document.