Safety science as a research field has been declared “effectively stagnant”.

Dr Drew Rae, a senior lecturer in the Safety Science Innovation Lab at Griffith University, says little progress has been made towards understanding what causes accidents, or how to prevent them.

He said a “battleground of ideas” has emerged in which intellectuals advocate for and against particular big picture worldviews, rather than focusing on solid progress.

Dr Rae says three groups of people particularly suffer as a result of this issue.

The first group is safety practitioners.

“At the moment, a huge amount of practitioner effort is spent on unrewarding activities that are unsupported by evidence,” he said.

Dr Rae said some attempt to end this frustration by offering “more inspiring alternatives”, but those tend to be equally unsupported by evidence.

The second affected group is the research community.

“Every year thousands of academic papers are produced about safety,” said Dr Rae.

“The vast majority of these bear no direct connection to the work of safety practitioners, either in the data they draw from, or the impact they produce.”

The third group that suffers are that pay for the research.

“They are not victims, because they are highly complicit in the problem,” said Dr Rae.

He suggests these organisations should focus on “funding high-quality research that would make life better for everyone.”

Dr Rae co-authored the recent Manifesto for Reality-based Safety Science, calling for a move away from certain safety improvement projects, and towards more productive projects.

He says the less effective projects involve:

  • ideas that ignore the reality of daily practice
  • jumping to implementation before the problem is understood
  • excessive and inappropriate use of surveys as measurements for poorly defined concepts
  • using easy-to-collect data that does not reflect reality
  • ignoring recent advances in other research fields such as psychology and organisational science
  • implementing new practices without ways to measure their effectiveness

“What can we do about this?” Dr Rae asked.

“For businesses, the starting point is to realise that proper research about their own practices is a cost-saving exercise, not an expenditure.

“For practitioners, I think the key is to start thinking of ourselves as professionals,” said Dr Rae.

He says a professional should be guided by the best available evidence of what generally works.

“Where there is no such evidence, a professional should proceed cautiously, and should cooperate with researchers to advance the state of evidence, rather than operating beyond it,” he said.

“That’s what we expect of other life-critical professionals such as doctors.

“Why are we horrified when a doctor prescribes an untested treatment, but not horrified when a safety practitioner does so?

“Why do we pay for health researchers to thoroughly test each treatment, but only fund new research projects that promise shiny new pills, instead of the ones that offer thorough testing?”