This reminds me of the Surgical Safety Checklist. Effectiveness of the SSC is very much dependent upon both how much the hospital engages staff and provides resource support: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(09)61440-9/fulltext
... and the social dynamics in operating theatres: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/38032808_Uptake_of_a_team_briefing_in_the_operating_theatre_A_Burkean_dramatistic_analysis.
From recollection I think your Take5 study reviewed a site with good implementation in terms of available tools, management support, and paperwork completion, but Take5 did not seem to be about generating conversation between staff - which is a significant element of how SSC works. Conversation matters because different people bring different information and perceptions. SSC without free and open discussion quickly becomes another tick-box ritual.
Whether or not enhancing Take5 to make it a more involved process is realistic, I don't know. Not every task is as momentous as surgery.

I think the kinds of support you describe, so workers can better initiate and control processes, are great. But I think the role of management could be more than support from a distance and resource provision. Because how do you know that workers are not internalising some production pressures or values? In word and deed organisations often promote contradictory values (production and safety), and for the sake of career some workers will be very keen to respond most to edicts that suit short term company financial goals. Which means workers may accept some unsafe practices on behalf of other company values. And, workers may also seek to legitimise institutional norms that some harms are inevitable. In the case of medical/nursing work for example, professionals consign some patient risks to luck, and don't manage them. Possibly in a more supportive system they would, but some of the carelessness reflects occupational group norms. If you want to change those norms then management having some active (not dominant) role in the process may be essential, through facilitation, humble leadership, careful challenge, measurement and monitoring (if possible), etc.

... there might also be some culture to address about some harms being minor/trivial and a sign of true dedication to the work and not to be made a fuss over. But is that really okay? And what is the connection between common minor harms and occasional major harms? Discuss those questions. You can't really make people change those sorts of beliefs because they are deep seated cultural-emotional, but some reflection might bring staff to decide collectively that another safer way is preferable and better.

Something that maybe needs to be said here is workers do normally assess risk, and they have real skin in the game! Gherardi & Nicolini nicely documented this in 'The Organisational Learning of Safety in Communities of Practice', about how construction workers learn from one another, and assess and monitor risks. The process is very informal, with a lot of shouting, pointing, touching and hitting things. And some ridicule and abuse for those who get it wrong. All very different from formalised written assessments (although that would differ by industry) and maybe another reason bureaucratised processes can be performed as ritual. None of this is to say that workers cannot do better. Their ways are less than perfect. But implementing new ways of being safe needs to take account of the fact workers do attempt to do that already and are also making trade-offs with production pressures. So an alternative to Take5 might be something along the lines of generating discussion with workers in forums of some kind about successes and failures (talk about the former first so they can they can then acknowledge what isn't so good) and supporting them to design a process with as much of their input as possible on the basis that they are the (fallible) experts in things that can hurt them at work. Because while safety may be one of their priorities it's probably not their first, and it can be shifted up the hierarchy if the workplace does genuinely support that (as oppose to talk it up but the real priority is elsewhere).

I cannot see any weaknesses in evidence or argument in the Havinga et al article. I wondered if the problem might be faulty implementation, but that objection seemed effectively countered.

I was reminded of 'A Manifesto for a Reality-based Safety Science' (2020), which argued that safety theorists tend to generate theory without specifying practices, empiricists tinker with theory but don't test it, and practitioners act without using theory or evidence. Havinga stepped outside that and empirically tested a theory - which is great!

There must be an alternative in the Safety 2 toolbox, but what precisely I don't know. Havinga suggest that reducing the need for staff to defend themselves against blame would help. A cultural shift, which is not easy of course.

I could only find a summary of some 2023 results. Some 2023 findings might reflect that safety is really hard. Safety appears simple and obvious, but in practice it's not. Maybe people are feeling that.

In healthcare, safety became a policy priority following the 1999 US report 'To Err is Human,' but 20 years later (despite many small localized successes) there is not much evidence of widespread improvement. There is tension between clinicians, administrators and regulators. The work is intensely pressured and complex - more pressured and more complex all the time - such that harm is inevitable. But it should not be as bad as it is. In the early days patient safety was acknowledged to be hard, but it was also assumed there would be significant progress with the right effort. The outlook now is gloomier.

Politically, we've gone from a government that lost the plot to one that never had much of a plot. That has an affect. Policies are short-sighted and destructive and the leader isn't inspiring.

The ongoing SARS-CoV-2 pandemic isn't helping. People are more sick more often. I haven't seen NZ data, but last year German workers took 20 sick days each on average (breaking the record set the year before). In the UK, since the beginning of the pandemic, 1.5% of the entire workforce has become newly economically dependent because of long-term sickness (workforce non-participation due to long term sickness was previously steadily decreasing for two whole decades). In the US 6.8% of all adults currently have Long-Covid, and 31% of them claim it significantly impairs their capacity to perform daily activities. Since Omicron was let loose in NZ school absences due to illness/medical have increased by 50%. There's an obvious health and safety problem here that is getting very little attention beyond demands for people to toughen up. The long-term outlook in terms of unwellness and things like brain injury from SARS-CoV-2 (a safety and a competency issue) is very bad because people are losing IQ points and visuo-constructive capacity.

The distinction you make there reminds me of Snowdon's Cynefin framework for decision making. Situations are simple, complicated, complex or chaotic. Simple situations are about best practice, which I guess means these are the rules and you have to follow them.

As James noted and a few others implied, signing the register risks becoming a tick-box exercise with no engagement, awareness and behaviour change (but it might legally protect you so there is that). As others have suggested I'd be thinking about (and possibly asking/discussing with them) what might engage your workers more fully in the process of understanding and responding to risk. Some people are very not reading focused in terms of absorbing safety information.

"I see on the news victims saying they would not have gone onto the island if they knew an eruption was eminent."

The issue here is the public are awful at assessing risk. People trust what others are doing, and they trust that businesses will keep them safe.

Such trust is naive. It was exploited by business operations that made a good profit for many years. And everyone let it go because the businesses were happy. Those unlucky ones who paid the cost of horrendous injury, lost life and terrible suffering should have been protected from what happened. White Island was always going to erupt. This was no black swan event.

"is it important for the tour operators to inform the visitors to the extent that they (the visitors) could make an 'informed decision'?"

Yes, but this is difficult. The warning would need to be graphic so people can make the decision both intellectually and emotionally. Intellectual decisions are sometimes very bad because they filter out real consequences. You can give someone something to read but half the people will gloss it, they will listen to what others say, they will take a cue from the body language and expressions of the person who hands it to them, they will set risks aside because they already decided to do the trip and are emotionally invested in it, etc.

Tourist trips to White Island should never have been allowed. Which means the regulator is primarily at fault. The business also are to blame as well but really the regulator should be prosecuting themselves. I guess they have a clause which means they can't do that.

• There is currently no evidence of human infection with SARS-CoV-2 caused by infectious aerosols distributed through the ventilation system air ducts. The risk is rated as very low.
• Well-maintained HVAC systems, including air-conditioning units, securely filter large droplets containing SARS-CoV-2. COVID-19 aerosols (small droplets and droplet nuclei) can spread through HVAC systems within a building or vehicle and stand-alone air-conditioning units if the air is recirculated.
• The airflow generated by air-conditioning units may facilitate the spread of droplets excreted by infected people longer distances within indoor spaces.
• HVAC systems may have a complementary role in decreasing transmission in indoor spaces by increasing the rate of air change, decreasing the recirculation of air, and increasing the use of outdoor air. — Julie

I'm struggling to reconcile some of these claims: No evidence of infection via aerosols distributed through ventilation. Aerosols can spread through HVAC systems if air is recirculated.

What have I misunderstood?

Is the important difference between ventilation (used air is deposited outside and new air comes into the system) versus re circulation (used air is reused)?

A recent study of RAT test reliability found those used in NZ have a 31% false negative rate early in the infection period and an 11% false negative rate late in the infection period.

https://www.evidencealerts.com/Social/Article/nWo8EtxY6Roo7LTvH4lcXg?Source=twitter#.YiUR6J7Op0k.twitter