Early Occupational Health and Safety Interventions for Small Businesses: An Environmental Scan

Small businesses (SB) constitute a significant proportion of businesses in all major industrial sectors and pose challenges to occupational health and safety (OHS) authorities. They contribute disproportionately to the total burden of work-related injuries, illnesses, and fatalities. Reaching SB early in their life cycle to support OHS could decrease injuries and related burden. Our objective was to describe the nature of early OHS interventions for SB.

We conducted an environmental scan (ES) of OHS interventions that could be implemented early in SB. We searched for documents from peer-reviewed literature, non-peer-reviewed literature, and websites. Findings from the documents were synthesized using a framework of intervention types from Michie et al. We also conducted interviews with 11 key informants who had experience with OHS in SB and, using a qualitative thematic analysis, produced a narrative summary. We synthesized the document review and interview findings.

We found 20 relevant documents from all sources describing 24 OHS interventions for SB that could be applied early. The most prevalent SB interventions were education (increasing knowledge), enablement (through consulting and tools), training (imparting skills), and persuasion (through assessment, feedback, and planning). The interview data revealed similar types of interventions, but informants often noted an explicit focus on reaching businesses early.

Our findings reveal that there are few published OHS interventions explicitly focused on application early in the life cycle of SB. However, there were 24 interventions identified that could be applied early, most often focusing on education, enablement, training, and persuasion.