SAFER to SAFERi:

In 2021, a working group of senior leaders (CEOs, Administrators, Executive Directors) from Nova Scotia’s Long Term Care, Home Care, and Disability Support Program organizations was formed to identify a set of core safety practices that they felt all senior leaders in their sectors should be putting in to place and supporting. The working group reviewed a number of different safety leadership models and research that speaks to the importance of leadership, at the CEO level, to on organization’s health and safety culture and performance.

The working group members agreed that the SAFER Leadership Model represented good leadership practices that they identified with, supported, and felt should be used by all senior leaders. However, the group members felt that the SAFER Model failed to cover the role of senior leadership in the identification and mitigation of health and safety risks. Some felt that this fundamental component of an effective health and safety program could be covered under one or more of the SAFER Model’s elements, e.g. A or F, and others asked if it was not an operational aspect of health and safety program implementation. After much discussion the group all agreed that they would like to specifically call out the importance of senior leadership when it came to ensuring that policies, processes and feedback mechanisms were in place to identify and mitigate health and safety risks. They also agreed that senior leaders need to ask questions and insist on timely, accurate, and impartial information to provide themselves with a clear and accurate picture of the organization’s health and safety environment and to help them lead a process to identify health and safety opportunities and further mitigate risk.

The working group endorsed a small change to the SAFER model, adding an ‘i’ element to create the SAFERi Safety Leadership Model.

The SAFER Leadership Model was reviewed and discussed by a Leadership working group made up of 15 CEOs, Executive Directors, and Administrators from Nova Scotia’s Long Term Care, Home Care, and Disability Support Sectors. They all agreed that the model was a good way to approach the issue of safety leadership and they indicated that they all look for opportunities to put the SAFER Model into practice.

During the discussions the leaders indicated that the SAFER Model would be enhanced by making it more explicit that senior leaders in an organization need to play an active role in ensuring that hazard identification and risk management activities are taking place in their organization. They noted that senior leaders need to ask clear and specific questions about risk to workers, how hazards are identified and what these hazards are, results of inspections and incident investigations and on the impact of activities and programs implemented to reduce risk. They need to ask questions and insist on timely, accurate, and impartial information to provide themselves with a clear and accurate picture of the organization’s health and safety environment and to help them lead a process to identify health and safety opportunities and further mitigate risk

The 15 sector leaders suggested that the SAFER model become the SAFERi model, with the ‘i’ standing for ‘Identify and Manage Risk’. It was agreed that all senior leaders in Nova Scotia’s Long Term Care, Home Care, and Disability Support Sectors receive education, information and support to implement six Standard Safety Leadership Practices, or the SAFERi Safety Leadership Model.