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BackgroundThe economic crisis of 2009 led to a wave of corporate reorganisations and bankruptcies, with many dismissals of employees. GPs were confronted with subsequent health consequences. AimTo assess the possible relationship between losing one's job and having suicidal thoughts. Design and settingA survey of patients aged 18-49 years recruited from GP practices in Belgium in Deurne (Flemish region) and La Louvière (Walloon region) from September to December 2010. MethodAnonymous self-administered questionnaire. ResultsOf all eligible patients (n = 1818), 831 were offered the questionnaire and 377 completed it (45.4%). More than one in five had been confronted with employment loss in the past year (the responder or someone close losing their job). Almost one in ten had lost their job themselves in the past year. More than one in four had experienced suicidal thoughts and 11.7% had seriously considered ending their life in the past year. In the logistic regression analysis, the following characteristics showed a statistically significant relationship with having suicidal thoughts: being single (odds ratio [OR] = 4.8, 95% confidence interval [CI] = 1.7 to 13.8), not having satisfying social contacts (OR = 5.1, 95% CI = 1.6 to 16.2), having depressive complaints (OR = 18.4, 95% CI = 5.8 to 58.4), and having lost one's employment in the past year (OR = 8.8, 95% CI = 2.0 to 39.3). ConclusionThis study points to a statistically significant relationship between losing one's employment in the past year and having suicidal thoughts. It emphasises the important role of the GP in the continuous and reinforced assessment of suicidal risk in times of recession.

Major accidents in Western countries, receiving a lot of media attention in the 1970s, are starting point for research into internal and external domino-effects in the chemical and petrochemical sectors and clusters. Initially, these reports are published by government institutions and government-related research centres. With the upcoming quantitative risk analyses in the 1970s and 1980s, the so-called 'coloured books', published in the Netherlands, play a prominent role in quantifying these dominoeffects. Since the mid-1990s, the second European Seveso Directive encourages scientific research on domino-effects, shown in substantially growth of academic publications on the topic. Research in Western countries is dominated by risk assessments, probabilities, and failure mechanisms are calculated for the complex phenomenon of domino effects and its consequences. Previous works are closely related to political, official and private decision-making. A transition towards risk management and specifically dynamic risk assessment is still in its infancy. A future transition is necessary to understand initial scenarios as starting points for domino effects and also the spatial-temporal evolution of events which is necessary to identify the most probable sequence of events during domino effects. We will demonstrate via an exemplary case study the difference between the a conventional (static) and a dynamic method in modelling and risk assessment of domino effects. In India a wake-up call for domino-effects occurs in the mid-1990s. Chinese publications on dominoeffects in the international scientific press appear from the mid-2000s onwards. Due to a rapid industrialisation, the numbers in China country are overwhelming, versus chemical companies, as versus of many major accidents in this sector.

There has been an increase in research into the security culture in organizations in recent years. This growing interest has been accompanied by the development of tools to measure the level of security culture in order to identify potential threats and formulate solutions. This article provides a systematic overview of the existing tools. A total of 16 are identified, of which six are studied in detail. This exploration reveals that there is no validated and widely accepted tool that can be used in different sectors and organizations. The majority of the tools reviewed use only a quantitative method; however, security culture includes very different domains and therefore a mixed-method approach should be used. In contrast to security culture, instruments for measuring safety culture are widely available, and with many similarities between these two domains it is possible that well-established tools for measuring safety culture could be adapted to a security environment.