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This paper considers some implications of recent developments relating to patient safety for understandings of trust in health care contexts.

Conceptual analysis focusing on patients' trust in health care providers and health care providers' trust in patients.

Growing awareness of the scale of the problem of iatrogenic harm has prompted concerns that patients' trust in health care providers may be threatened and/or become inappropriate or dysfunctional. In principle, however, patients' trust may be both well placed and compatible with current understandings of safety problems and efforts to address these. Contemporary understandings of patient safety suggest that, to be deemed trustworthy, health care providers should make vigorous efforts to improve patient safety, be honest about safety issues, enable patients to contribute effectively to their own safety, and provide appropriate care and support after safety incidents. Patients who trust health care providers need not be ignorant of patient safety problems and may be vigilant in the course of their care. Iatrogenic harms do not necessarily reflect breeches of trust (not all such harms are yet preventable), and patients who are harmed might in some circumstances appropriately forgive and resume trusting. Health care providers may feel vulnerable to patients in several respects. From their perspective, trustworthy patients will act competently to optimise the outcomes of their health care efforts and to preserve health care providers' good reputations where those are justified. Providers' trust in patients may strengthen patients' trust in them and facilitate safety improvement work.

Shows how, in principle, trust can be compatible with current understandings of patient safety issues and may enhance efforts to improve patient safety.

Partnership arrangements in industry have increased in interest because of the perceived business benefits that these alliances can bring to organisations. However, it has been claimed that it is important to align organisational cultures in order that these partnership arrangements are successful. This case study reports a benchmark assessment of employee and contractor safety climates in an offshore oil company that operated contractor partnership agreements in the North Sea. The study used a questionnaire in order to assess safety climates in terms of employees’ and contractors’ perceptions of safety management, workplace conditions and safety concerns. Factor analysis and structural equation modelling were used to support the benchmark study in order to compare the employees’ and contractors’ beliefs in the organisation’s health and safety philosophy. The results obtained indicated that safety climates could be aligned in organisations that operate partnership agreements within a recognised health and safety management system. It is suggested that the approach presented is appropriate for benchmarking safety climates before and after partnership arrangements have been established in order to determine the level of cultural alignment that has been achieved.

The frequent occurrence of hazards, especially on junior staff in developing countries, is a major setback on project delivery. This is because the safety of the construction workers' environment influences their performance. Although a range of literature has addressed safety measures on construction sites, how far is their compliance with personal protective equipment (PPE) on junior staff is yet to receive in-depth studies in Nigeria. Therefore, this study investigated the level of Nigerian construction companies' compliance and proffered possible solutions that intend to improve the implementation of PPE on junior staff.

The data were collected via observation and face-to-face interviews among the selected companies' staff in Lagos and Abuja. The interview is to determine their perceptions regarding compliance with PPE on construction sites.

Findings show that compliance with PPE on junior staff, especially the indigenous construction companies, is poor. This is because monitoring and enforcement are lax by government regulatory agencies. Also, findings show that many international construction companies ensure that junior workers obey site safety measures those mitigate the chance of hazard occurrence during construction as a policy.

This paper data collection is limited to Abuja and Lagos, and a phenomenology type of qualitative research was employed, but this does not weaken the robustness. Future research is needed to consider adopting a mixed-methods approach.

As part of this paper's implications, findings recommended that the construction company's safety regulations and policies should be robust and enriched to mitigate site-related hazards via a framework or mechanism, but the government agencies/ministries need to give the enabling direction, strict monitoring and enforcement of PPE on junior staff. This paper intends to stir up the appropriate government authorities for possibly passing the Labour, Safety, Health and Welfare Bill 2012 (updated in 2016) Act into law.

This study demonstrates that the government agencies concern with approval and enforcement of construction site safety needs to reawaken to their responsibilities because of the lax implementation in many sites, especially in indigenous construction sites.

European air transport policy, emerged through the confluence of case law and legislation, in four broad areas: liberalization, safety and security, greening, and the external policy. Following the implementation of the single market for air transport, policy shifted to liberalizing and regulating associated services and in recent years to greening, the external aviation policy, and safety and security. Inclusion of air transport in the Environmental Trading Scheme of the European Union exemplifies the European Commission’s proactive stand on bringing the industry in line with emission reduction trajectories of other industries. However, the bid to include flights to third countries in the trading scheme pushed the EU into a controversial position, causing the Commission to halt implementation and to give ICAO time to seek a global multilateral agreement. The chapter also discusses how the nationality clauses in air services agreements breached the Treaty of Rome, and a court ruling to that effect enabled the EC to extend EU liberalization policies beyond the European Union, resulting in the Common Aviation Area with EU fringe countries and the Open Aviation Area with the USA. Another important area of progress was aviation safety, where the EU region is unsurpassed in the world, yet the Commission has pushed the boundary even further, by establishing the European Safety Agency to oversee the European Aviation Safety Management System. Another important area of regulatory development was aviation security, a major focus after the woeful events in 2001, but increasingly under industry scrutiny on costs and effectiveness. The chapter concludes by arguing that in the coming decade, the EU will strive to strengthen its position as a global countervailing power, symbolized in air transport by a leadership position in environmental policy and international market liberalization, exemplified in the EU’s external aviation policy.

The aim of this paper is to set a baseline understanding of the corporate social responsibility (CSR) concept amongst the different stakeholders in the mining industry in Ghana and further examine their appreciation of issues of occupational health and safety. It explored the integration of issues of health and safety of employees into the broader CSR agenda through a stakeholder analysis.

The study population comprised various stakeholders operating in the mining industry of Ghana. The purposive sampling technique was used in the selection of the organisations/institutions that participated in the study. In all, 35 people were interviewed, and the interview data were analysed using thematic-content analysis.

The findings provide an insight into how the various stakeholders in the mining industry in Ghana understood the CSR concept and how they went about practising it. Appreciation of issues health and safety by the various stakeholders also received considerable attention. All the stakeholders equated CSR to community relations. In all the cases, respondents referred to the local community as their focal point when discussing the concept.

On the basis of this paper, it appears that mining companies in Ghana have looked upon the concept as a strategic challenge and not as a series of high-profile initiatives aimed at ensuring a responsible business practice. This paper adds to the literature by providing a perspective on how CSR associates with health and safety.

The voluntary hospital trustee has traditionally seen issues of medical care, including those of patient safety, as falling within the delegated sphere of the medical staff. This customary distancing of the trustee from direct involvement in patient safety issues is now challenged by unprecedented scrutiny of hospital safety results through voluntary disclosure or mandatory public reporting. This new climate, fostered by the Institute of Medicine's To Err is Human and the Institute for Healthcare Improvement's 100,000 Lives campaign, has complicated the role of the trustee in satisfying the traditional “prudent person” test for meeting fiduciary obligation as the trustee's breadth of involvement expands. Viewed theoretically, Mintzberg models the hospital as a case of a professional bureaucracy, in which the professional staff is responsible for standard setting and regulation. This traditional role of the professional staff is potentially assumed by others lacking technical background. Trustees are now asked to examine reports identifying physician compliance in attaining safety standards without education in the practice supporting those standards. Physician board members, whose numbers have increased in the past decade, are often sought to take the lead on interpretation of patient safety standards and results. The very public nature of patient safety reporting and its reflection on the reputation of the organization for which the trustee is ultimately accountable create a new level of tension and workload that challenges the dominant voluntary model of trusteeship in the United States health system.

The purpose of this paper is to present a socio‐legal case study, examining how the legal notion of “reasonable safety” provision has come to be constructed by municipal cemetery managers in relation to gravestones and other memorial structures over the last decade in England.

The paper takes a social constructionist approach to the subject of the case study. It is based upon a literature review of relevant law, policy and guidance, and on the results of qualitative face‐to‐face, semi‐structured interviews with a small sample of English municipal cemetery managers.

The issue of memorial safety illustrates the tensions that can arise between safety and conflicting priorities, in this case sensitivity to the bereaved. The paper shows that the simple promulgation of guidance will not automatically lead to it being accepted by all as “good practice”. The interviews show how organisations and individual managers have sought to make sense of, and render workable, their legal obligations, by drawing upon, and at times ignoring or adapting, available guidance.

The interview study is based upon a small non‐random sample, accessed via a single phase of enquiry in Spring 2008. The influence of fear of liability may manifest differently in other cemetery managers and/or change over time. In view of the novel, and powerful, “resisting‐forces” in the case of cemeteries direct comparison with the risk perception of managers in other parts of the built environment may be difficult.

Given the lack of existing research in the field of liability perception by landowners, the paper contributes to the analysis of the generic processes by which safety guidance is negotiated, and reconciled with competing drivers in the management of the built environment.

This study aims to introduce the reader to some problems faced by safety practitioners operating within an airline safety department, particularly risk assessment subjectivity, and processing of flight data monitoring events. In doing so, it attempts to propose solutions to these issues.

Quality management tools, including six sigma, in combination with flight data monitoring, are proposed as a solution to the issues identified.

The proposed solutions reduce the subjectivity of some risk assessments and help airlines to efficiently process flight data monitoring events.

This paper presents a two-part case study of how these issues have been dealt with by an airline. However, as demonstrated by the literature review, there seems to exist further advanced methods, some of them still in a developmental stage, to deal more effectively with the problems discussed.

This study is particularly directed and more valuable to small-scale airlines. These are more susceptible to the lack of resources needed to implement advanced approaches into the safety management system, but still want to adopt a systematic way of conducting business. Furthermore, it highlights common issues faced by safety practitioners in airlines and should hopefully stimulate the discussion around the topic and promote other academics/practitioners to share viable solutions.

This chapter presents a theoretical framework of the industrial relations (IR) system in China’s coal mining industry, combining the roles of management organizations, workers, and trade unions, as well as government agencies. It is one of the first empirical attempts to investigate the relationship between human resource (HR) practices, labor relations, and occupational safety in China’s coal mining industry over the past 60 years, based on the secondary data on coal mining accidents and case studies of two state-owned coal mines in a northern city in Anhui Province, China. The fluctuating occupational safety has been affected by government regulations over different time spans, marked by key political agendas, and by coal mining firms taking concrete measures to respond to these regulations, while exhibiting differing safety performance in state-owned versus township-and-village-owned mines. The field studies compared a safety-oriented to a cost-control-oriented HR and labor relations system, and their influences on safety performance. Coal mining firms and practitioners are advised to shift the traditional personnel management paradigm to a modern HR management system. In addition, although workers are often blamed directly for accidents, it is suggested that workers’ participation and voice in various processes of decision-making and policy implementation, and trade unions’ active involvement in protecting workers from occupational hazards, be encouraged.