What is the difference between a safety program and safety culture?

Safety Program is short term & specific for a Particular Situation, employees or Period in any Organization as example we see that in a Organization the HSE Department provides Safety Trainings Programs periodically to enhance Safety, Production and Security among the employees.

Where as Safety Culture is achieved by the above step. HSE Culture is not a station BUT it is a Journey that is achieved by continious imporvements, audits, feed backs & support of the Management from top to bottom for a specific but essential cause.

program is visual thing while culture is inherent thing. safety program is arranged to aware people about safety while safety culture what is doing peple safely by its ownself,

 safety program is trained and text book     safety culture is the result of the program , if it is effective the safety culture and attitude of all employees will reflect this 

Simply speaking safety programs are proposed and done to inculcate safety culture in the organisation to its employees. So safety programme is one of the methods to create safety environment.

Safety program is result oreinted and subjected to specific task. like you can prepare a Safety program to decrease the non compliance of usage of PPE among worker or develop a3R (reduce/ reuse/ recycle) program to have some results. A typical program elements are Policy/ objective, orginizing, planning and implementation, evaluation, audit and continual improvement.

However Safety culture of an organization is the way that all the people within the organization think and feel about health and safety and how this translate into behavior. It can be defined as shared attitudes, value, beliefs and behavior relating to H&S.

The Safety Culture of an organization can be assessed by looking into indicators such as incidents/ accident, sickness rates, absentteism, staff turn over, non compliance to the rules and worker complaints.

The factors which could lead to deterioration of H&S culture include: Lack of leadership commitment, Blame culture, H&S  receiving low priority, organizational changes, poor management system and procedures etc