Abstract:

INTRODUCTION The fact that our country is among the countries with the highest number of occupational accidents in the world is another point that calls for the importance required to be given to the Safety Culture. Upon a literature review on safety culture, it appears that the number of studies carried out in Turkey on safety culture and local governments is limited. It is known that the field applications of Occupational Health and Safety has been recently introduced in the public sector and the employees have been recently developing the skills to adapt to such new applications required by legal terms.   Safety and Safety Culture; The term of safety may be defined in general as: ‘the feeling of being safe’. According to another definition, safety means: “to minimize possibility of a premature death, injury, or worrying conditions in order to ensure and protect the acceptable level in the existing environment”. Cultural systems are not only the output of the present behaviour, but they are also the conditioner of the future behaviour. Safety should not be restricted to a mere definition in entities, but should turn into a culture where this is applied as a strategy.   Occupational accidents are globally among the most important concerns of the business life. According to the figures provided by the International Labour Organisation (ILO), 1 worker for every 15 seconds and 6300 people per day lose their lives due to an occupational accident or illness in the world. In addition, 317 millions of occupational accidents occur per year in the world, where over 2.3 millions of people die out of these accidents.(28)”           . It is evident that occupational accidents are an important concern of the work life in Turkey, as well as in the world. According to the data of Social Security Institution, 12.143 employees in total lost their lives to occupational accidents in Turkey in the period of 2000-2010. Only in 2011, 69.227 occupational accidents occurred, in which 1700 employees lost their lives(29)”. These being the official figures, it is a known fact that the actual number is more than that, when unrecorded (non-notified) accidents are taken into consideration.

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