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Safety Culture Workshop Themes

You may have read on our website that the NZIPS Secretariat employed Research New Zealand to complete a safety culture survey. The survey's primary aim was to establish a baseline regarding people’s beliefs and attitudes to a safety culture. It is high level and broad based, stemming from short phone interviews with 1001 people. The report can be downloaded here. (PDF 2.2M)

Recently at the IPNANZ Conference in Napier, members of IPNANAZ were asked a series of questions in Dee Young's 'Developing a Safety Culture in New Zealand Workshop', and here are the results:

  1. Do the results reflect what you see in your own communities?
    • All attendees felt survey findings reflected their communities and personal concern about road was also high. People felt this was due to the high profile visual campaigns around roads.
    • Others mentioned concern about crime, personal safety and violence.
    • Ignorance of statistics around the home was common in attendees communities as was ignorance of consequences
  2. How to influence people’s perceptions and resulting behaviours
    • Role modelling in government (no violence in parliament)
    • Use story telling regarding experience of home injury and its impact (cost and consequence) to make it real and personalised, e.g. like JK’s mental illness experiences. TV campaign ideal call to action.
    • Use creativity to get message across – need to rethink approach – something different is required.
    • Use different media to fit different communities / audiences, e.g. tv, ethnic /community radio, movie adverts.
    • Language is key (don’t use the word accident, say intentional/ unintentional injury).
    • Show people benefits of behaviours preventing injuries - ask what’s in it for them and get that message across.
    • Collaboration needed to ensure all (communities, sector, agencies) are singing the same message.
    • Use competitions, e.g. like Safekids photo competition showing wrong way and right way (ask retailers eg. Mitre 10 to give prizes).
    • Make it sustainable.
    • Be positive, e.g. push play national ads, not blaming and shaming or using scare tactics, say 'this is how we do it'.
    • People’s behaviour affected by regulations, compliance and neighbourhoods.
    • Pick your target audience.
    • Use evidence, data and statistics (local data to heighten awareness).
    • Need social and neighbour interaction to foster connectedness.
    • Personal safety (e.g. bullying, gangs, dogs etc) viewed as a real risk in low socio economic communities.
    • Emphasis on road safety has led to some negative outcomes with parents not allowing kids to walk/cycle to school and not wanting to get kids involved in walking school buses viewing it as too dangerous in some areas.
    • People realise/think children are vulnerable in home but don’t necessarily follow with appropriate action.
    • Understand peoples fears often focus on the most horrific danger possible rather than the every day danger.
    • Public have a fear of crime-this can differ in different communities.
    • Raising awareness is not enough as it doesn’t always result in behaviour change.
    • Supportive environments
  3. Where to from here
    • Currently IP field too fragmented, need to work on collaboration to obtain strong consistent message. Target and support joint mutual projects.
    • Incentivise safety.
    • Government needs to shift some resources from road into home safety or find extra money to fund home safety.
    • Start local and then connect local and national campaigns for better integration.
    • Look for long term funding and programmes / strategies.
    • Provide educational resources to NGOS, such as Age Concern, e.g. fact sheets on percentage of various home injuries and dollars spent on these.
    • Provide further analysis of survey (look at serious injury indicators and NZHIS data and DALYS).
    • Provide leadership (community and government).
    • Provide suggestions for moving forward, e.g. safer communities.
    • Individual agencies (not NZIPS) to repeat survey across different settings, eg workplace/education.
    • Mixed campaign in media to promote prevention.
    • Local neighbour engagement.
    • Give people enough notice to enable them to participate.