Occupational Health and Safety Conditions Among SMEs: A Case Study Based in The District of BA, FIJI

Abstract

After the implementation of the Occupational Health and Safety (OHS) Act in Fiji, larger organisations mainly managed to enforce the required section of the Act into their organisations through incorporation and amendment of policies and procedures, whereas Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) still struggle with basic administrative requirements and arising OHS issues. They face a variety of issues including OHS. Hence, their priority largely shifts to operation and smooth running of the businesses. The OHS issues are quite visible as the SMEs play a pivotal role in the Fijian economy, where more than half of the population are employed by the SMEs. This research is focused in the area of OHS in SMEs. A mixed method research was used to get the perspective of the participants for better understanding of the subject where both, qualitative and quantitative analysis were done to derive conclusions. For qualitative sampling, there were 20 participants including the employers and the employees, whereas for quantitative sampling, a total of 53 people including the employers and employees participated. For data collection, employers and employees from different companies in Ba, Fiji was selected. The results showed that for this research, qualitative methods gave better perspective of the participants about OHS conditions after which the solutions/recommendations were derived. Therefore, this study can be used for further research in the area to promote continuous improvements in the SMEs.