What do safety professionals believe about themselves?

I have just finished listening to Episode 30 of The Safety of Work Podcast with Dr Drew Rae and Dr David Provan from the Safety Science Innovation Lab at Griffith University. Excellent and very thought provoking. The paper Drew and David are discussing is Benefactor or burden: Exploring the professional identity of safety professionals. 

I particularly liked the section where they discussed values:

• H&S professionals need to be independent enough to provide professional advice, insight, and objectivity but close enough to operations to understand the needs of the business.

• Safety is rarely a standard to be achieved; it is a point of consensus between stakeholders.

• H&S professionals need to be consistent with other professionals. For example, Tax Accountants. They save money and reduce the tax burden by use laws in their favour as much as they can. But there is a time a tax accountant will say ‘No, I am not comfortable doing more than that’. In other words a tax accountant knows where the line is between tax minimisation which is legal, and tax avoidance which is illegal.

• Safety professionals this is not so clear; we need to learn how to work out where that line is, and we need to be supported in that. As safety is often not clear cut, it is up to individual safety professionals to reflect on where that line is.

You can find this excellent episode via your favourite podcast app or direct from their website:

https://safetyofwork.com/episodes/ep30-what-do-safety-professionals-believe-about-themselves