Boustras, Georgios

Although analysing categorical data from incident investigation reports provides meaningful associations amongst causal factors of incidents, however, to date, no studies considered these associations in designing actionable interventions for safety improvement. We propose a methodology using descriptive analytics and axiomatic design framework. In this study, we have analysed injury, and ‘property-damage’ data, collected for 45 months from a large integrated steel plant. The data are analysed using the contingency table, Cramer's V, Phi coefficients (ϕ) and Fisher's exact test. The ‘wire-making division’ is the most injury-prone. Unsafe acts done by fellow workers are significantly causing injuries in ‘support services’, maintenance and ‘steel-making’. The property-damage cases are mostly reported in ‘steel-making division’, and caused by material-handling, crane-dashing, toxic-chemical, hot-metal and process-related incidents. It is also found that SOP inadequacy and non-compliance are significantly associated with ‘property-damage’ incidents. The key interventions from axiomatic design are as follows. For process-related incidents, regular inspection and maintenance of safety-critical equipment should be done. Safety-critical instrument and alarms can also be used to monitor safe operating limits of processes. Unsafe acts by fellow workers are the result of lack of coordination and communication. So, the management should identify and provide the types of safety training necessary to improve the same. The material-handling related problems can be handled through improved staff competency and communication. To address the SOP related issues, operating procedures should be reviewed, revised and communicated regularly.

Purpose: Every year thousands of acres are burned and a number of people lose their lives in forest fires that increasingly surpass the wild land limit and lead on to touristic, urban areas. By and large, Mediterranean countries rely highly on offering a tourist product based on sea, sun, culture and nature. While the sea and sun are not affected by fire catastrophes, places of cultural and natural beauty are indeed hit; tourists end up being uninformed with no proper guidance from the firefighting authorities. This paper seeks to address these issues. Design/methodology/approach: This paper attempts to highlight the relation between fire catastrophes and tourism development, to identify if and how state authorities take into account tourists in the planning and management of appropriate measures. A comparative study between Greece and Cyprus is presented. A number of interviews with stakeholders on the policy and operational level were conducted and the results and their implications are presented. Findings: Planning and suppression is complicated with a number of actors involved in various stages; national tourism organizations in both countries do not take part in the information or planning process. There is an emerging need for the provision of useful, comprehensive, practical information aimed at tourists. Research limitations/implications: The findings of the paper are based in a number of interviews with key policy makers as well as key operational commanders. The participation of the above in the policy making as well as operational phase shows a number of limitations. This paper presents a qualitative approach to the subject. A follow-up quantitative study is already planned. Practical implications: Lessons learnt from previous catastrophes, in-depth analysis of the existing "modus operandi" and "rules of engagement" should provide the necessary background for creating new risk-based, comprehensive, focused communication campaigns. Social implications: Safer societies and lower impact on the environment are the main outcomes of a concerted communication campaign. Tourism represents and multiplies the image of the country as a whole to the world; a solution to the problem would offer added value. Originality/value: The paper is based on a number of in-depth interviews with actors that took part in the actual handling of the two major catastrophes in Cyprus and Greece. The outcome of the interviews is presented for the first time.

Safety Science was established in 1976 as the Journal of Occupational Accidents. Safety Science was established with the vision of promoting multidisciplinary research in the science and technology of human and industrial safety and serving as a guide for the safety of people at work and in other spheres, such as transportation, energy or infrastructure, as well as in every other field of hazardous human activities. To celebrate 40 years of publishing outstanding research, this study intends to develop a bibliometric analysis of the publications of the journal between 1976 and 2016. The purpose is to identify the leading trends of the journal in terms of impact, topics, authors, universities and countries. This study uses the most reliable database, the Web of Science Core Collection. Moreover, the work analyses the mapping of bibliographic couplings, co-citations, citations, co-authorships and co-occurrences of keywords.

The aim of this study was to report the occupational hazards (job risks) of Public Health Inspectors (PHIs) in Greece and investigate possible relationships with burnout and job satisfaction. A sample of N = 185 PHIs total number of 606 (response rate 30.5 %), working in public health services departments nationwide. Data collection was performed in the second and third quarters of 2021, via an online survey. The survey included a ques tionnaire for risk perceptions, presenting risk factors in each risk categories: physical, chemical, biological, ergonomic, psychosocial, and organizational, while burnout was measured with Maslach Burnout Inventory (MBI) and job satisfaction with Spector’ s Job Satisfaction Survey (JSS), also developed instrument for measured training quality and needs. A novel theoretical model was proposed, which after the results of the findings of this study indicated that for Greek PHIs psychosocial, ergonomic, and organizational risks were more prevalent compared to other risk categories. Moreover, psychosocial risks were significant predictors of burnout, while organizational risks and emotional exhaustion were linked to job satisfaction. PHIs working in rural areas re ported higher perceptions of biological risks and burnout, compared to employees working in urban or semi urban areas. This study contributes to the limited evidence supporting the link between job risks, burnout and job satisfaction adding new information to occupational health and safety for the field of public health inspec tion, which could be exploited to advance the quality of Public Health Services provision. Also reported high training needs especially, protection against biological agents such as coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19).

Management of health and safety in micro-enterprises (less than 10 employees) is a critical issue due to the relatively high level of injuries in such firms. It is also an under-researched area in the international safety literature. The present paper is based on a nationwide survey with the cooperation of the relevant health and safety enforcement authority among micro-firms in several economic sectors. Micro-enterprises comprise a major percentage (95.4%) of business firms in a small economy like Cyprus. The survey examined the perceptions and work attitudes of workers and their relationship with safety performance of the particular firms.This paper presents the results related to the perceptions of employees. A previous paper presented the results focusing on employers. Information was collected on their demographic characteristics and major influencing factors of safety performance like employee participation in safety decisions and safety training. The safety performance measure, an index comprising several safety performance aspects was assessed by the health and safety (labour) inspectors, in order to overcome potential problems of common method bias when all data are obtained from the same group of respondents.The findings suggest that safety performance has a positive and statistically significant correlation with safety training provided by the firm. It has also a positive and statistically significant association with the safety information available to employees and with the perceived safety conditions. The effect of the participation of workers in safety decisions and their organizational commitment, although significantly correlated with safety performance as individual variables, are not statistically significant after controlling for the effect of the other variables mentioned above. The results show the important relationship between safety training and other good practices (like provision of information and improved safety conditions) on safety performance in micro-firms.

In the last few years a number of catastrophes have taken place in Cyprus; accumulating loses of millions of pounds, destroying valuable ancient pine tree forests and disrupting rural life for days and in a few cases weeks and months. A survey, aiming to gather information and opinions about the current fire safety situation in wildland fires was carried out. The aim of this study is to provide the reader with an adequate idea about the existing situation in Cyprus as far as safety is concerned in wildland areas.

The recent discovery of hydrocarbons, in large quantities, in Cyprus has brought to the surface, fundamental issues dealing with previously unknown and unchartered, locally, territories. In a sort time, Cyprus will have to transform itself, from a services oriented economy to a hydrocarbon producing and trading economy. The local energy storage industry comprises of small energy storage facilities (7 companies) in a congested area. The plan for the next five years, includes the construction (some of it has already been done) of big energy producing and storage facilities. By default some—if not all—of the existing safety officers and workers, will be part of the new era. The aim of the study was to measure a number of parameters that make up safety culture. In particular—based on previous literature—parameters such as the existence of safety policies, safety performance, safety climate and other were measured with the use of a survey tool in the form of a questionnaire.

Adaptation of our built environment and our Critical Infrastructures will be required to enhance their resilience to climate change. Resilience, as currently promoted for CIs, focuses primarily on minimisation of disruption from extreme weather events and rapid recovery to pre-disruption service levels. Anticipation, absorption through robustness and redundancy, adaptation and recovery are the key attributes in such approaches. Climate change, however, is a unique challenge in that it is characterised by various timescales (short, medium and long), predictable and unpredictable events and slow-onset and rapid-onset events. Severe climate change will also result in a climate regime that is significantly different to our current regime. This requires transformation of our CIs to ones that are flexible, modular and diverse. We propose a framework for enhancing CI resilience to climate change which will move from incremental change to transformation of our CIs. Our framework proposes three timescales (short, medium and long term) and the properties needed at each timescale to achieve the transformation required.