Introduction to Workplace Safety and Health Management, By Goh Yang Miang (2018) Singapour/London: World Scientific Publishing Co., 225 pages. ISBN: 978-981-32-7425-9

“...Good WSH [Workplace Safety and Health] can lead to organisational excellence”. I could not agree more with this statement found on the back cover of the book. So it is with great interest that I started reading it. Chapter 1 is entitled Introduction. It presents some basic notions (e.g. accidents, ill health, environmental pollution, etc.), the Singapore Workplace Safety and Health Act with its basic principles and a chart of the main duties of the various duty holders, some consideration on the costs of accidents and on WSH management. It also presents some widely known figures like Frank Bird’s iceberg of accident costs and his accident pyra-mid, as well as the Plan-Do-Check-Act cycle of Walter Deming’s wheel of continual improvement (underlying all WSH management standards). However the notion of System dynamics, also known as Systems thinking, which is supposed to be the backbone of the book as the subtitle of the book (“A Systems Thinking Approach”) implies, is described in a short section. The contribution of Systems thinking to WSH management is unclear, and its role as the guiding thread of the book is not explained, as one would expect in an introduction. Chapter 2 is about incident causation. Throughout the book, the notion of incident includes those of accident, ill health and environmental pollution. The author presents a certain number of well-known models of incident causation (Heinrich’s, Haddon’s, Bird’s, Reason’s). Then he introduces the concept of “causal loop diagrams (CLDs)”, which “can be used to describe system archetypes”. Although these dia-grams are in line with “systems thinking”, unfortunately it is unclear how these CLDs shed new light on our comprehension of how accidents occur. There is no explanation on how to use these diagrams, and the author himself does not use them in the case studies at the end of the book. If this model is to make a contribution to the field of WSH management, further explanations and a more thorough demonstration would be required. Incident investigation is the subject of Chapter 3. The author explains briefly the importance of incident investigation and analysis in the WSH management process, the steps of an investigation and the types of evidence. The major part of the chapter is devoted to an analysis technique called Event Causation Technique (ECT) apparently developed by the author. This technique is interesting, but it is difficult to see what its original contribution (if any) to the domain is, as there is no comparison with other major wide-spread techniques such as the Fault-tree analysis or the French INRS method. One wonders whether this technique is better than the others at identifying fundamental causes of accidents, which is the most difficult part of an accident investigation. Even though Chapter 4 is about Risk Management, it begins with a figure based on the ECT technique (and so will Chapters 5 to 8). The first part of the chapter oscillates between genuine risk management and incident causation. By linking the two too closely, one can be led to the false perception that the only input to risk assessment is the risk factors identified during incident investigation. The foundations of risk management, however, are well presented, and so are the steps of the process. The design stage of any project is the ideal moment to eliminate dangers at source. Hence the importance of Chapter 5. The process and its steps are clearly described, even despite the clear focus on construction projects. In the field of WSH, when the words Management and Systems are associated, it is generally in the context of national or international standards or guidelines. Chapter 6 uses …