A survey of safety culture assessment in high risk industries

Since the Chernobyl accident, safety culture became one the fundamental elements in many industries especially in high-reliability organizations. Since then many researchers investigated safety culture, developing new standards, methods and approaches for safety culture assessment (SCA). Despite the considerable amount of studies in safety culture, there is still a lack of consensus on the definition of the concept, on the main indicators that shape safety culture of an organization, on the assessment methods, etc. We explore the current challenges of safety culture, focusing on the current tools and methods for SCA. We undertake a survey of safety culture experiences in the main safety-critical industries such as nuclear, railways, offshore, aviation, airlines, health care, etc. We review both academic and applied literature up the year 2011. Our results help to establish a comprehensive view on the subject, its main terminologies, existing tools, and main obstacles. We investigated the similarities and the main differences in the approaches taken by different industries and we formulated suggestions on how the nuclear domain could benefit from the best practices of non-nuclear applications. Our main goal is to explore the existing tools of SCA, the degree of their computerization, their restrictions, generalizability and usability.