SYSTEMATIC REVIEW article
Front. Public Health
Sec. Occupational Health and Safety
Volume 13 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpubh.2025.1642941
This article is part of the Research TopicNavigating Environmental Hazards in the Workplace: Impacts and InterventionsView all 12 articles
A Comparative Review of OSH Risk Management Policies Between North America and Southeast Asia
Provisionally accepted
- 1Department of Community Health, Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences, Universiti Putra Malaysia, Serdang, Selangor, Malaysia
- 2Co-Chair Occupational Health Committee (Management), Integrity Maintenance Ltd., Carlyle, SK., Canada
- 3Department of Occupational Safety and Health, Sarawak, Kuching, Sarawak, Malaysia
- 4Department of Chemical and Environmental Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, Universiti Putra Malaysia, Serdang, Selangor, Malaysia
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Introduction: Literature implies that a comparative analysis of Occupational Safety and Health (OSH) policies may provide significant knowledge to create and maintain safer and healthier workplaces, yet there are constant debates on what type of OSH policies will be more effective. Further, there is limited or no knowledge in literature on the comparative analysis of OSH risk management policies between North America (Saskatchewan, Canada, and the USA) and Southeast Asia (Malaysia, Singapore, and Thailand).Methods: This review employed Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analysis (PRISMA) to ensure the eligibility of included regional OSH policies and employed the Population, Intervention, Comparison, Outcome and Study (PICOS) framework to develop search questions. This review performed high-level qualitative analysis to assess and compare the types of OSH policies and utilized a quantitative analysis to determine the effectiveness of the OSH policies in the regions based on the data associated with the SDG 8.1.1.A qualitative analysis of the regional OSH policies revealed that the North American regions incorporated more performance-based OSH policy styles, whereas Southeast Asian regions inclined to practice more prescriptive OSH policies. Singapore reported the lowest injury rates (nonfatal and fatal) and the highest ratio of OSH Inspectors to Workers. General multivariate regression analysis indicated that there was a significant and positive relationship between the ratios of OSH Inspectors to Employed-Persons and Non-fatal injury rates, but the negative relationship between the OSH Inspectors and fatal injury rate was neither significant nor reliable.This research's findings validate current literature. Also, the higher numbers of OSH Inspectors to Employed-Person ratios may play a significant role in lowering the regional non-fatal injuries. With larger sample sizes and primary research data, future researchers can explore or examine the findings of this research, including the optimum effective ratios of OSH Inspectors to Employed-Persons to prevent or minimize human suffering and human loss. Practitioners may constantly monitor the effectiveness of the ratios to enhance the SDG 8.1.1 performance in the regions.
Keywords: Occupational Health and Safety1, policies2, Prescriptive3, Performance-based4, Risk Management5, HIRARC6
Received: 07 Jun 2025; Accepted: 17 Jul 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Kathayat, Baharudin, Wilson Lee and MOHD TOHIR. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Mohd Rafee Baharudin, Department of Community Health, Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences, Universiti Putra Malaysia, Serdang, Selangor, Malaysia
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