[The report on a divisional plan as an evaluation of results]

The adoption of norms of recommended practice (NRP) by industrial management (a fundamental step in ensuring a safer and healthier work environment, is in our opinion a suitable approach for evaluating primary prevention programmes. We tested this hypothesis in the shoe and leather goods manufacturing industry (55 facilities). An ordinal scale was defined for each variable taken into account by NRP and for other variables related to employers' actions. A score was assigned to every facility with reference to the starting and ending points of the programme. In this way we estimated the degree of variation, in time and among facilities, in adopting NRP.