New ways of managing prevention - a cultural and participative approach

Despite of more than twenty years of enforcing the Danish Work Environment Act and empowering a number of institutions, the rate of occupational accidents in Denmark has not been reduced. Several factors can explain this disappointing status. The maintained accident rate could, among other things, be explained by the lack effective methods of accident prevention appropriated to Danish workplaces. Whereas research on occupational accidents in other Scandinavian countries in the same period has developed such methods, we have in Denmark turned the efforts concerning work environment in other directions. Thus, up-dated knowledge on occupational accidents has been has been rather sparse in this country.