Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) – 8 promotes inclusive and sustainable economic growth, employment, and decent work for all to achieve safe working environments. Workplace accidents have a significant human, social, and economic cost that we must seek to eliminate by ensuring that all workplaces are safe. Promoting a safe culture in organizations can reduce and prevent these accidents, especially if it is focused on the human factor and safe behaviour by people.
Dr Nelly A. Amaya recently defended her doctoral thesis at IQS, in which she established a Safe Culture indicator at the Universidad Centroamericana José Simeón Cañas (UCA) in El Salvador based on the application of the Distributed Security Management (DSM) model.
Universities also represent spaces in which the importance of safe behaviours can be created and internalized, along with considering impacts on future professionals. To do so, universities must create and promote a safe culture to engage in patterns and values that work towards accident prevention. Therefore, universities have a mission to influence behaviours, foster a culture of safety, and share this culture with students.
In the IQS Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science, expert researchers in occupational safety developed the Q-AsSeVi tool to evaluate the perceptions of individuals and members of organisations based on organisational, technical, and psychosocial factors that affect their daily lives, called the Distributed Safety Management (DSM) method. The model was designed to be implemented in industrial environments in Spain.
Within this context, Dr Nelly Azucena Amaya conducted her doctoral thesis at Ramon Llull University, entitled Distributed Security Management as a tool to create a safety culture in university students and future professionals. She defended her thesis at IQS and was supervised by Dr Julià Sempere Cebrián, Professor Emeritus at IQS, and Dr Susana Del Cerro Ramón, Professor at the Blanquerna School of Psychology, Education and Sport Science.
The main objective of her thesis was to establish a safety culture indicator at the Universidad Centroamericana José Simeón Cañas (UCA) in El Salvador, based on the Distributed Security Management (DSM) model.
Application of the DSM method at the UCA
To carry out this study, Dr Amaya used the Q-AsSeVi tool, designed to evaluate the five dimensions of the DSM model: Commitment, Management and Consistency, Participation, Responsibility, and Rigorous Compliance. Since the DSM model was originally designed for industrial environments in Spain, she adapted her thesis to a university environment in El Salvador to research the perception of safety at the UCA, both for students and employees. In addition, the questionnaire was adapted to the Covid-19 pandemic situation.
The questionnaire was first administered to UCA students and staff in 2019, detecting indicators that showed the greatest room for improvement. Subsequently, and after the establishment of various actions concerning the COVID pandemic (2021 and 2022), the questionnaire was distributed again among the UCA community in 2023. After the actions applied in 2021 and 2022 by the UCA in the DSM environment, the questionnaire presented significant changes to perceptions in the five indicators. Dr Amaya’s research showed that the Participation dimension of the DSM model presented the greatest opportunity for improvement within the context of the UCA, followed by the Management and Coherence dimension.
Dr Amaya’s thesis has shown that the Q-AsSeVi questionnaire is applicable for being adapted to a university environment and beyond the national context where it was created, maintaining its reliability and covariance characteristics through which it has been found that it can be used in a university setting. This research opens up the option for universities and higher education institutions to evaluate their environments in terms of a safe culture, thereby allowing them to demonstrate and guide their work on the issue of generating a safe culture that can be shared with society through their future professionals.
Related publications
Nelly Amaya et al, Distributed Safety Management as a tool for creating a safety culture in university students and future professionals, Journal of Loss Prevention in the Process Industries, 2019, 57, 114-119.
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