Building a Culture of Safety: Contributions from Public Health
ISBN: 978-1-78714-618-1, eISBN: 978-1-78714-617-4
Publication date: 12 April 2019
Abstract
Building a culture of safety in transportation is not dissimilar from building a culture of safety in health. Public health is widely known for protecting the public from diseases through milk pasteurization and chlorination of drinking water, and from injuries by implementing environmental and occupational safeguards and fostering behavioral change. Lifestyle and environmental changes that have contributed to the reductions in smoking and heart disease can also help change driving, walking and cycling behaviors, and environments. Stimulating a culture of safety on the road means providing safe and accessible transportation for all. The vision for a culture of traffic safety is to change the public’s attitude about the unacceptable toll from traffic injuries and to implement a systems approach to traffic injury prevention as a means for improving public health and public safety. Framing the motor vehicle injury problem in this way provides an opportunity for partnerships between highway safety and public health to improve the culture of safety.
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Acknowledgements
Acknowledgments
The author is grateful to Peter Kissinger, former director of the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety, for his leadership articulating the importance of traffic safety culture and for funding research grants to understand and promote effective approaches to reduce traffic injuries; Bella Dinh-Zarr for her contribution to many parts of this chapter and for her global leadership as a member of the National Transportation Safety Board; Natalie Draisen from the FIA Foundation for her input and substantive engagement in safety culture globally; Ann Dellinger, Grant Baldwin, Erin Sauber-Schatz, Laurie Beck, Erin Parker, Bethany West, Mick Ballesteros, and Gwen Bergen at the CDC Injury Center; and the late Pat Waller for their many contributions to the premise of this chapter and for their stewardship promoting the public health approach to traffic safety. Portions of this chapter were derived from the public domain non-copyrighted work of Sleet et al. (2007) and Dellinger and Sleet (2010).
Citation
Sleet, D.A. (2019), "Building a Culture of Safety: Contributions from Public Health", Ward, N.J., Watson, B. and Fleming-Vogl, K. (Ed.) Traffic Safety Culture, Emerald Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 3-17. https://doi.org/10.1108/978-1-78714-617-420191003
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
Copyright © 2019 Emerald Publishing Limited