1. Behavioural Insights in Health and Safety: INSPECT
Bev Bishop

2. Nudges in Health and Safety
Traditional health and safety often assume rationality…
But we think in different ways
Bat costs £1 more than a ball. Together they cost £ How much is the ball?
‘System 1’ (subconscious) and ‘System 2’ (conscious) behaviour

3. Incentives Norms Salience Priming Emotion Choice architecture Trust
What are the deterrents to poor H&S behaviour? How can we incentivise desirable behaviour by emphasising the immediate costs?
Is the desired behaviour a norm in health and safety in your industry? Are you inadvertently reinforcing negative norms?
Norms
Salience
How can you convey messages in ways that are attention-grabbing and relate to personal experience?
Priming
How can you make the visible environment one that (subliminally) supports safe practice?
Emotion
Use emotional cues, such as people’s reactions to certain words, sights and sensations? Personal effect of resulting health conditions on family of sufferer?
Choice architecture
What are the ‘defaults’ in the organisations you deal with? How can risk be ‘designed out’. How can it be made easier for employees to reduce risks? What would make it easier to report near misses?
Who are the trusted messengers for each of the different constituencies that are at risk? How can you encourage them to ‘spread the word’? Consider social connections, expertise and influence.
Trust

4. Salience – Draws attention, is ‘catchy’ and easy to remember
Dumb ways to Die – catchy tune. Australian commercial showing ‘Dumb Ways to Die’ – selling both your kidneys on the internet; eating a three week old unrefrigerated pie - ending with driving round the gates of a level crossing, crossing the tracks. Fall in railway death and injuries of 21% within 3 months of launch.
Messages are easier to remember if they are simple. Using rules of thumb and mnemonics can help in this respect. For example, for quarry workers, a rule of thumb is that if they can see over the road’s edge protection it is probably not high enough to protect vehicles on it.
VICES prompts us on storage of flammable materials (Ventilation, Ignition, Containment, Exchange — for something less flammable — Separation).
‘Shattered Lives’ Campaign; Tulip Case Study; meat processing plant at Ashton realised that slips and trips made up a large proportion of their accidents and put simple measures in place to address this; introduced trays to stop meat and fat falling on the floor; changed floor surfaces to easy-clean, high grip substance; revised cleaning procedures. Resulted in a 28% reduction in slips and trips from 2004 – 2009.
Requests for 17K additional knots
Encouraging the clean up of non-toxic dust in ceramics: Participants suggested that dust could be made more noticeable by the design of workstations, perhaps by using black glass and/or UV lighting.
Pharmaceuticals: Hand out PPE with grinder wheels (which normally have to be checked out
Agriculture: Point of use warnings, e.g. Green promise knots

5. Priming: Subliminally supporting safe practice
Cup of coffee – feel more warmly to interviewer. Use words associated with old people – means they are more likely to use the stairs
Pair of eyes over an honesty box increases contributions.
Need to make sure it doesn’t backfire – Teen mother giving talk at school. Wearing hi-vis jackets make people take risks?

6. Choice structure: Is it easy to make the right choice?
Best way is to design out risk – dead man’s switch
Default administrative systems
Rotation of tasks to avoid repetitive strain injury
Process flow that includes cleaning up
- Avoid systems with encourage speed over correct practice, e.g. piece rates, task and finish
Private sector organisation understand this – walking past the biscuits to get to the bread, eggs and milk. How you structure choices?
It’s impossible not to structure choices
. Other ways of ‘designing out’ risk include a ‘dead man’s switch’ on a train which requires active engagement to keep the train going.
Ordering choices
Designing out?
Defaults on pension contribution systems – these are the best
Inserted safety interlock as an example of a default – designs out unsafe conditions – Enclosure and automation. We know about HSE’s hierarchy of controls.
You can also mandate a choice – e.g. DVLA tick box, yes or no for organ donation.
Manual handling and MSDs in whisky industry: .
It is hard to use engineering solutions in some environments, e.g. Victorian pubs, so train people in flexible techniques that can be adapted to less than optimum environments.
Ceramics
One of the drivers of workers only cleaning up at the end of the day is their perception that the state of their workstation does not impact on others. Participants suggested that this could be changed by workstation ‘hotdesking’, where workers returned to a different workstation after every break.
The use of proper equipment (i.e. not brushes) could be encouraged by only having portable vacuums available.
Process flow default should included cleaning, so it is seen as integral to the production process rather than following on, or preceding it.
Most prominently displayed - Position on ballot paper. California mandates random allocation of names.
Mandated breaks, lockers to secure personal belongings before they get to workstation
Near miss forms available around workplace to fill out easily instead of having to search for them.
Case 24 from HSG 196 ‘Handling Food and Drink’; a meat plant’s trolleys had faulty wheels & were causing injuries; staff couldn’t tell if trolleys were faulty until they’d loaded them, so were tempted to just use them anyway. Staff were trained to put markers on even slightly faulty trolleys and not use marked ones. A fabricator was employed to fix & maintain them. This resulted in fewer injuries, fewer staff complaints, and an increase in productivity; time previously lost to loading/unloading & locating working trolleys was now saved. Training ‘designed out’ risk and markers made working trolleys the default option.

7. Problems and limitations
Much we don’t know about subconscious influences – Test, learn, adapt
Organisational dimension – ORGANISER
Regulatory certainty can still be needed (for avoiding catastrophe)