Education: an essential tool for the dissemination of the Culture of Safety

The authors, operating within The General Safety Issues and Goals in Turin Universities -TGSIGTU research project, started from a thorough analysis of the International literature on the Culture of Safety, and made the challenging effort to classify and organize the covered sub-topics, highlighting in particular the sub-categories of Educational processes. It is important to underline that the goal of such a classification is to better manage the amount of information collected and not to compartmentalize the theme of Safety, universally recognized as a multidisciplinary Science. There are numerous examples of interventions aiming the goal of a widespread dissemination of the Culture of Safety, and different parameters that make them incomparable, but useful: among them, authors quote the audience they are addressed to. In particular: 1. The National Institute on Occupational Safety and Health - NIOSH developed the Youth@Work—Talking Safety to educate young people about essential information transferable across industries and occupations. 2. With a different audience, Politecnico di Torino, in cooperation with Occupational Medicine experts, Environment and Workplace Prevention Technicians from Università di Torino, and some experts of National Boards operating in Occupational Safety and Health - OS&H field, provides some bachelor courses on OS&H basics. 3. Furthermore, Politecnico provides general information and engineering-readiness skills focusing on some core competencies for post graduate students, employees and practitioners operating in the field of OS&H, and National Inspectorate such as: OS&H topics and discussion, Computer-aided systems as support in the analysis of scenarios, research projects about the advanced techniques for the analysis of accidents. All the activities are based on the assumption that education should be tailored for three main groups of people: • the new entry workforce; • medium-term employed workforce; • the experienced workforce. Moreover, a fourth category is raising. In fact, the third group is growing directly proportional to the ageing of the workforce, in turn connected to the raising of the retirement age. Similar considerations leaded European Occupational Safety and Health Administration - EU OSHA and NIOSH to develop research campaigns on the matter. The paper summarizes the approaches to the dissemination of the Culture of Safety to those various categories of people, in particular the main approaches developed in Politecnico di Torino, and suggests that these topics can be effectively addressed in parallel with the progress of knowledge in the technical fields.