Main Factors for an Occupational Health and Safety Management System for Mexican Manufacturing Companies

Abstract: The Occupational Health and Safety are factors and conditions that have a positive impact, promotes a safe and healthy working environment, and these issues among the companies give wellness to personnel, contractors, visitors and any other person in working places, and this is achieved with the help of managing risks in the workplace. In Mexico, the occupational health and safety factors have been treated individually to reduce accidents, insurance cost and increase performance of existing operations but these individual actions created confusion among Mexican manufacturing companies. The Social Prevention and Labor Secretary established a technical program in occupational health and safety management. Five steps are used to represent basic security scheme. On the other hand, the health programs deal with the identification of important alarms and the promotion of actions to eliminate them. These issues consider job environments as well as pandemic. In order to control both aspects, Mexican factories have created an Occupational Health Management System as well as a Safety Management System. The purpose of this research is to formulate a unique Occupational Health and Safety Management System (OHSMS) using structural equation models (SEM) to help Mexican manufacturing companies to conduct their efforts. A survey was conducted with 14 items based on international occupational health and safety standards. This research questionnaire was applied to 32 certified manufacturing companies within Mexico. An exploratory and confirmatory factorial analysis was focused. With exploratory factorial analysis we could established the three main factors and their components and these three main factors were validated using the confirmatory factorial analysis. The three factors were: health and safety focus, occupational health and safety management system, and continuous improvement. The Tucker-Lewis Index obtained is equal to 0.999 which is higher that the recommended value of 0.90. Thus, the three main factors can be considered for a structural equation model. Some of the variables considered for the OHSMS were: risk control, corrective actions, planning, audits, education and training, etc. Using LISREL, a structural equation model was created to propose a valid OHSMS model for Mexican manufacturing companies to implement and benefit from good health and safety management in their facilities.

Keywords: Health and Safety, Factors and conditions, Exploratory factorial analysis, Confirmatory factorial analysis.

DOI: 10.54941/ahfe100159

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