Search Results (954)

The construction industry remains among the most hazardous, with workers in horizontal transportation infrastructure facing additional risks from dynamic work zones, live traffic exposure, and variable environmental conditions. Immersive technologies such as Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) offer new approaches to accident analysis and prevention, yet their applications toward improving occupational safety in transportation construction have not been comprehensively reviewed. This paper presents a systematic review of 54 studies published between 2016 and 2025 collected from two online databases (Transportation Research International Documentation and Web of Science). This review synthesizes how immersive technologies contribute to occupational risk assessment, safety training, and real-time hazard monitoring in the construction of roads, bridges, tunnels, and work zones. Each study is classified across two dimensions: the immersive medium (VR, AR, etc.) and the operational context within the construction lifecycle (onsite tools, offsite monitoring and planning, simulation-based analysis, and workforce education). This dual classification is the first to systematically map immersive technology applications for occupational safety, specifically within horizontal transportation infrastructure. The findings of this review demonstrate the unique use cases of each immersive medium, revealing that VR is primarily used for controlled experimentation and full-immersion remote analysis, whereas AR and handheld devices are preferred for field-deployed applications. Despite these promising capabilities, widespread adoption remains limited by hardware constraints, challenging field conditions, and organizational resistance. This suggests that future work should focus on safety systems tested in real-world settings and rigorously evaluated by domain experts to enable their integration into standard workplace risk management practices. Full article

The purpose of this study is to examine how the leadership competence of school leaders supports the implementation of psychosocial safety climate (PSC) within an educational workplace. While recent studies have considered how various leadership styles influence PSC, the processes through which school leaders at different levels enact and develop PSC in practice continue to receive limited attention. This study addresses this gap through a qualitative case study at a school in Aotearoa, New Zealand, which employed a sequential data collection process comprising 26 interviews and three focus groups. This investigation found that exemplary leadership, overcoming complexity, and multiskilled leadership are pivotal competencies that enable PSC implementation within a school setting. More broadly, we discuss how these key leadership competencies facilitate the development of policies, practices, and procedures that promote teachers’ psychological health and the four domains of the PSC framework. Finally, we propose a Leader Competence–PSC Framework as a practical tool for investigating and evaluating school leader competence across specific PSC domains. Full article

Public Safety Personnel (PSP) face numerous potentially psychologically traumatic events in the line of duty. Resilience courses intended to mitigate the effects of operational stress injuries in this population—many of which are available online—have proliferated in recent years. An environmental scan yielded 15 courses that met all inclusion criteria. Courses were required to be offered for $250 or less and had to be created and/or hosted in Canada. Courses focused on individual (n = 7), family (n = 2), or workplace (n = 6) resilience. A qualitative content analysis was conducted. Data were extracted from public-facing documents and course materials, and supplemented by additional text materials and contacting program staff for clarification, when necessary. Coding and synthesis were completed in iterative team meetings. Courses were compared across numerous dimensions, including focus, intended audience, cost, enrollment details, length, instructional style, customization for PSP, and completion requirements. Nearly half of the courses (46.7%) were available free of charge. Outcome data were available for four of the courses, with most studies showing initial gains in resilience, skills, knowledge, attitudes, intentions, and/or behaviors, but with evidence of skill decay over time. The potential benefit of short refresher sessions warrants further investigation. Full article

This study examines how different dimensions of leisure literacy relate to work–leisure boundary management and work performance in digitally connected workplaces, addressing the problem that leisure may function as either a restorative resource or a source of boundary conflict. Drawing on boundary theory, the study adopts an exploratory case-based survey design using data from 75 employees in a Taiwanese fire safety enterprise, combining self-reports, supervisor evaluations, and organizational records, with findings analyzed through correlation, subgroup comparison, and regression-based analyses. The results indicate differentiated pathways: positive leisure attitude is associated with work–leisure balance and higher self-rated performance, whereas excessive leisure involvement is associated with increased boundary conflict. These performance-related patterns were more consistently observed for self-rated than for supervisor-rated performance, so performance implications should be interpreted with appropriate caution. Leisure knowledge shows a regulatory role primarily in reducing conflict rather than directly enhancing balance. The results further suggest that comparative leisure/work importance conditions these relationships: when work and leisure are valued more equally, leisure literacy relates more directly to performance, whereas under value imbalance, boundary management becomes more salient, linking leisure literacy to work outcomes. Family life-cycle differences were also observed, although these are treated as contextual. Overall, the study suggests that leisure literacy may support sustainable work performance by shaping whether leisure functions more as a resource or as a source of friction. By extending boundary theory to the work–leisure interface, the study highlights boundary regulation as a relevant issue for sustainable human resource management in digitally connected environments, particularly under conditions of blurred work–leisure boundaries. Full article

Oilfield worksites and the communities shaped by them are increasingly recognized as gendered spaces in which rotational labor, contractor hierarchies, and production imperatives can reshape norms of accountability and consent. This scoping review synthesizes conceptualizations of oilfield masculinities in scholarship on oil and gas extraction and examines their links to gendered harm, moral strain, and institutional accountability. Following PRISMA-ScR guidance, multidisciplinary databases were searched for English-language publications (2000–March 2024); eighteen sources met the inclusion criteria. A supplementary media scan (2000–2025) was conducted to contextualize cultural narratives surrounding oilfield labor. The synthesis identifies recurring themes, including frontier and breadwinner masculinities, emerging safety-oriented masculinities, gendered workplace exclusion, and the relational impacts of rotational absence and reintegration. Across studies, harms are most consistently described as patterned outcomes of work organization and fragmented governance rather than isolated incidents. Media representations frequently amplify heroism and endurance while minimizing institutional responsibility. Full article

Background: During the flu season, there is an increase in absenteeism due to illness, a drop in productivity, and a greater risk of the virus spreading among workers. Thus, the Italian Ministry of Health recommends vaccination for essential service workers. The University of Salerno, in collaboration with the local health authority of Salerno, offers free vaccination to its employees. Methods: A public health methodology for seasonal influenza vaccination in the workplace is presented—specifically in the university setting—with the aim of identifying individual, contextual, and organizational elements of the model that have promoted vaccination uptake. An ad hoc questionnaire was used (October–December 2025) to survey 399 academic employees, investigating seasonal influenza vaccination in the following aspects: recent personal experiences, motivations, vaccination experiences at university, sources of information, considerations regarding national and local vaccination campaigns, and level of vaccine confidence (VCI). Results: Seasonal influenza vaccination at the University is appreciated for its compatibility with working hours (66.1%), the availability of a platform that allows flexible booking (56.9%), the perception of safety in the environment (31.6%), the fact that the vaccine is free (17.4%), and the involvement of office/laboratory colleagues (5%). Participants appreciate the model and would apply it to other vaccinations at the University and in other institutional settings. A significant relationship (F = 7.24; df = 1; p < 0.05) exists between confidence in the vaccine and the sense of security experienced when receiving the vaccine in the workplace. Data analysis was performed using the IBM SPSS v.28 software. Conclusions: The model proposed can be applied to other institutional contexts, simplifying and facilitating access to vaccines by implementing vaccination campaigns tailored to specific work environments. Full article

While South Africa’s recycling chain relies heavily on informal labour, the burden of non-fatal workplace injuries among landfill-based waste pickers remains poorly characterised. This study aimed to estimate the prevalence of self-reported non-fatal workplace injuries and identify associated factors among informal waste pickers at landfill sites in Johannesburg, South Africa. We conducted a cross-sectional study at two purposively selected landfill sites in Johannesburg. Using convenience sampling, 354 waste pickers were enrolled (median age 34 years; 73.2% male). A structured questionnaire captured worker characteristics and self-reported injuries over the preceding six months. Robust (modified) Poisson regression was utilised to determine associations with self-reported workplace injury. Overall, 86.2% of participants reported at least one injury. Lacerations caused by contact with waste materials predominated (82.7%), followed by violence (20.5%) and needle-stick injuries (19.9%). Notably, 94.1% of participants reported using personal protective equipment (PPE), yet the injury prevalence was high. In the multivariable model, each additional year of landfill work experience was associated with a 1.0% higher prevalence of reported injury (adjusted prevalence ratio [aPR] 1.01; 95% CI 1.01–1.02). Conversely, pickers aged 51 years and older had a 32% lower prevalence of injury than those aged 18–28 (aPR 0.68; 95% CI 0.51–0.90). To mitigate these risks, municipal authorities should implement mandatory safety training for site entry, provide industrial-grade, puncture-resistant PPE, and formalise the integration of landfill pickers into institutional occupational health frameworks. Full article

Voluntary turnover represents a critical challenge in essential public services, where workforce attrition affects both employee well-being and service quality. The primary objective of this study was to identify the psychosocial predictors of well-being profiles and turnover intention among public transport workers, using the Job Demands–Resources model as a theoretical framework. A cross-sectional study design was employed, with 131 employees of an Italian public transport company completing a questionnaire assessing turnover intention and key psychosocial factors (job satisfaction, perceived work-related stress, work engagement, meaning of work, and perceived workplace safety). The analytical strategy integrated Latent Profile Analysis (LPA), logistic regression, and path analysis. LPA identified two distinct well-being profiles: a “low well-being profile,” with high perceived stress and low engagement and meaning of work; and a “high well-being profile,” with low stress and high engagement and work meaning. Logistic regression analyses showed that satisfaction with pay and the intrinsic nature of work tasks predicted membership in the high well-being profile. Path analysis indicated that profile membership significantly predicted turnover intention, with employees in the high well-being profile reporting lower turnover intention. Additionally, satisfaction with supervision, perceived workplace safety, and age showed direct effects on turnover intention. These findings highlight the organizational and psychological resources that can increase employee well-being and retention in the public transport sector, offering insights for preventive interventions and for promoting safer and more sustainable public transport systems. Full article

Societal expectations for serious breaches of health and safety legislation that lead to loss of life have changed. The Australian harmonized work health and safety legislation has introduced industrial manslaughter to many jurisdictions across Australia, placing senior leaders at risk of prosecution. This paper examines whether mining construction managers (those involved in the building or maintenance of infrastructure at a mine site) have been adequately prepared, both ethically and practically, to understand how complex socio-technical systems could fail and the role human cognitive architecture plays in such systems. A case study is presented, which adequately highlights tragic outcomes from management inaction. The aim of this perspective article was to critically examine whether there is the need for greater health and safety education for construction managers within Western Australia’s mining construction sector. The analysis argues for the importance of embedding fundamental health and safety education in tertiary curricula and statutory training programs to promote and strengthen a positive safety culture and reduce high-severity incidents. The conclusion of the review is that there is a strong case for giving future mining construction leaders a better introduction to the fundamentals of workplace health and safety during tertiary education. By including work health and safety in their curricula, educational institutions can better prepare students for leadership roles in the industry. Full article

Project ownership is a critical factor that shapes safety management systems and accident patterns in construction. However, the Ministry of Employment and Labor (MOEL) industrial accident database, which is the largest construction accident database in Korea, does not include project ownership information. To address this limitation, this study developed a fine-tuned KLUE-BERT framework that automatically classifies project ownership using unstructured text fields (site name, client name, and workplace name) in MOEL data. Training data were constructed through manual classification of the 2018–2023 approved statistics and data augmentation. The proposed model achieved high classification performance. Multilayered statistical analyses were conducted using the classified 2014–2023 construction accident data across six key accident variables: accident type, accident cause, construction scale, accident severity, occupation, and worker tenure. The results revealed statistically significant associations between project ownership and all six variables. Public projects exhibited relatively high proportions of accidents involving construction machinery and vehicles, whereas private projects exhibited higher proportions of fall- and scaffold-related accidents. This study presents a novel artificial intelligence-based framework that generates analytical variables absent from the original data and demonstrates its utility through large-scale statistical analysis. The findings provide empirical evidence to support the development of project ownership-specific construction safety policies. Limitations include potential data leakage from pre-split augmentation and generalizability limited to Korean construction data. Full article

High noise levels in industrial workplaces pose significant challenges to occupational safety, particularly with hearing protection and effective communication. Traditional hearing protection devices, while effectively attenuating harmful noise, often compromise situational awareness by excessively isolating workers from the acoustic environment and preventing the perception of critical auditory cues (e.g., emergency alarms), thereby introducing additional safety risks. This paper presents a smart industrial safety system that integrates Internet of Things (IoT) and artificial intelligence (AI) and is based on intelligent hearing protection devices to (a) selectively attenuate hazardous industrial noise while (b) preserving human speech and (c) reproduce targeted audio notifications to workers near malfunctioning or hazardous machinery. A real-time voice activity detection (VAD) model is employed to distinguish vocal components from background noise to adaptively control digital signal processing filters. Furthermore, indoor localization enables the delivery of targeted audio messages to workers in proximity to relevant events. Experimental evaluations on embedded hardware demonstrate that the selected VAD model operates well within real-time constraints and effectively supports dynamic noise filtering. Objective evaluation of the filtering stage using Mean Opinion Score (MOS), signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), and Harmonics-to-Noise Ratio (HNR) shows consistent quality improvements across all tested conditions, with MOS gains up to +118%, SNR increases between +10.4 and +29.0 dB, and HNR improvements up to +6.22 dB, indicating enhanced speech intelligibility and preservation of voice harmonic structure even under high-noise scenarios. Robustness validation of the VAD module across varying acoustic conditions confirms reliable speech detection performance, achieving perfect classification at +10 dB SNR, very high accuracy at 0 dB (98.3%, ROC AUC 0.998), and stable operation even at $-7$ dB SNR (79.8% accuracy, ROC AUC 0.878). The proposed architecture achieves a balanced trade-off between hearing protection and speech intelligibility while enhancing the effectiveness of safety communications in noisy industrial environments. Full article

Background: Work-related stress represents a major challenge for nursing professionals and has significant implications for well-being, job satisfaction, and workforce stability. This study aimed to assess psychosocial working conditions and workplace stress among nurses in Slovenia and to identify organisational and occupational factors associated with stress exposure across different levels of care. Methods: A cross-sectional, non-experimental study was conducted using an online self-administered questionnaire. The sample included 736 nurses employed in outpatient settings, hospital wards, and high-intensity care units. Work-related stress was assessed using the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) Work-Related Stress Indicator Tool. Group differences were examined using the Kruskal–Wallis test with Bonferroni-adjusted post hoc comparisons. Associations between HSE dimensions and sociodemographic and work-related variables were analysed using Spearman’s correlation coefficients and multiple linear regression models. Results: Statistically significant differences between job positions by level of care were observed for all HSE domains except Demands. Differences in psychosocial working conditions were observed across levels of care, with several domains showing more favourable scores in outpatient and hospital ward settings compared with high-intensity care environments. Regression analyses identified job position by level of care, education level, income, workload indicators, continuous healthcare provision, and job mobility intentions as significant predictors across multiple HSE dimensions. Correlation analyses revealed consistent associations between adverse psychosocial working conditions, increased workload, and indicators of job mobility. Conclusions: This study shows that psychosocial working conditions among nurses in Slovenia differ by level of care, with several domains showing more favourable scores in outpatient and hospital ward settings than in high-intensity care environments. Work organisation—especially workload, role clarity, and managerial and peer support—was central to stress, linking adverse conditions to workforce instability and retention risks. Full article

Few studies focus on levels of concern among teachers regarding safety and health (S&H) such as indoor air quality and related environmental S&H topics in K-12 schools. Between October 2021 and June 2023, the New Jersey (NJ) Safe Schools Program provided work-based learning training to 163 newer NJ public secondary career and technical education teachers and asked them to complete online surveys regarding school S&H during the COVID-19 pandemic. There were 205 total survey entries out of 436 possible entries from multiple surveys (two surveys plus a follow-up survey in fall 2022 for those trained in 2021-22 SY). This paper focuses on concerns and perceptions of teacher S&H in physical workplaces with or without ventilation; perceived safety of cleaning, sanitizing, and disinfecting products (CSDPs); and who is responsible for school S&H. About half of the participants were “very concerned/concerned” about the health effects of CSDPs, and most believed principals are responsible for school S&H. School administrators and principals should take teacher concerns into account to develop, with safety professionals, relevant procedures, including for CSDP use, and provide adequate mechanical ventilation in classrooms. Full article

Background: Health and social care workers (HSCWs) experience high levels of stress, burnout and emotional strain. Psychological safety is increasingly recognised as a protective factor, yet limited research has examined how individual psychological safety and team psychological safety jointly contribute to mental health outcomes in frontline care environments. Methods: A total of 821 HSCWs completed validated measures assessing individual psychological safety (NPSS), team psychological safety (TPSS), well-being, burnout and acute stress. Correlational analyses and hierarchical regression models were used to evaluate the unique and shared contributions of individual and team psychological safety to each outcome. Results: Both NPSS and TPSS were significantly associated with well-being, burnout and acute stress. Team psychological safety emerged as the strongest predictor of burnout and acute stress, accounting for substantial additional variance beyond individual psychological safety, with increases in explained variance ranging from 0.14 to 0.16. For well-being, NPSS (β = 0.38) and TPSS (β = 0.36) were both significant predictors. TPSS demonstrated large effects for burnout (β = 0.67) and acute stress (β = 0.72). Conclusions: Psychological safety plays a central role in the mental health of HSCWs. Team-based psychological safety was particularly influential in protecting against burnout and acute stress, while individual neuroceptive safety remained important for supporting overall well-being. Strengthening both individual and team-level psychological safety may enhance resilience and reduce psychological risk within health and social care settings. Implications: Incorporating NPSS and TPSS within workforce assessment may support early identification of psychological vulnerability, inform trauma-informed organisational interventions and promote more resilient, supportive workplace cultures. Full article

Agriculture remains one of the most hazardous industries in Australia, with consistently high rates of workplace injury and fatality. Traditional approaches to monitoring safety performance in agriculture have largely relied on reactive lag indicators, metrics that capture incidents after they occur, such as injury rates, compensation claims, or fatalities. While useful for identifying trends and measuring past performance, there is a need for proactive lead indicators, and these are preventive measures that identify risk and promote safer practices before injuries occur. With limited research available on leading indicators specific to the agricultural industry, the modified Delphi method has been identified and designed for this study. A panel of experts will be engaged with the aim to achieve consensus on a set of valid lead indicators for Australian agriculture. This study will include four rounds of Delphi questionnaires with the addition of a face-to-face consensus conference to be included in round four. The data gathered in this study to identify Work Health and Safety (WHS) leading indicators has potential to improve farmers’ safety, wellbeing, and personal health, as well as reducing injuries and fatalities across the Australian agricultural industry. Full article