Abstract
Social epidemiology “is a branch of epidemiology that focuses particularly on the effects of social-structural factors on states of health. Social epidemiology assumes that the distribution of advantages and disadvantages in a society reflects the distribution of health and disease. It proposes to identify societal characteristics that affect the pattern of disease and health distribution in a society and to understand its mechanisms” [1]. Social epidemiology studies the factors that affect the susceptibility of a population to disease. The authors of this paper believe that there are strong parallels between the susceptibility of populations to disease and the susceptibility of organizations to the occurrence and distribution of accidents. This paper will discuss some of those parallels and possible approaches to understanding and reducing an organization’s susceptibility to accidents.
D. Minnema and M. Helfrich—Independent Consultants.
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We refer to the sequence of events between the initial exposure to a triggering event and the ultimate consequence as the progression of the accident.
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Minnema, D., Helfrich, M. (2020). A Susceptibility Model for Organizational Accidents. In: Arezes, P. (eds) Advances in Safety Management and Human Factors. AHFE 2019. Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing, vol 969. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-20497-6_2
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