I'd like to share a few reflections about my two-week lecture tour across Australia last October to illustrate the potential impact of culture on the success of safety-related interventions. Culture determines whether certain safety procedures can be implemented effectively. But cultures can also change as the result of a safety-related intervention, enabling acceptance and application of other interventions.
Here are six large-scale safety techniques I observed in Australia that would surely reduce injuries if used in the U.S. By considering the barriers we would expect to encounter when attempting to implement these strategies in the U.S., we begin to define the gap between a real and an ideal safety culture.