When health and safety interventions meet real-life challenges

In contemporary working life, health and safety problems are becoming increasingly complicated, thereby posing new challenges for preventive interventions. The enforcement of health and safety regulations has only limited impact on the core occupational safety and health problems experienced by workers. Moreover, employers and employees do not always follow the advice of health and safety practitioners and researchers, and even when they do, the interventions frequently fail to solve the complex problems. That is why we think it is necessary to move beyond a traditional risk control approach. Interventions must build on a better understanding of the interplay between market forces, societal regulations, core business activities and company strategies - all expressed through employers' and workers' interpretations of options and constraints. The occupational safety and health interventionist needs to be a reflective actor in this process, and the intervention needs to make sense in a broader context for all the actors involved.