Safety science
Patient Safety
Definition. Safety science is the interdisciplinary field that studies how accidents and harm arise in socio-technical systems and how safety is created and maintained, drawing on engineering, psychology, sociology and management.
Explanation
A 2014 special issue of the journal Safety Science examined the foundations of the field, its scope and its relation to practice (Le Coze et al., 2014). In that issue, Aven (2014) set out what safety science is as a discipline and as a knowledge-generating process and argued that it needs broader, uncertainty-based perspectives on risk, while Hollnagel (2014) argued that safety should be defined and studied by what happens when it is present, not only by accidents and failures.
Patient safety borrows much of its vocabulary from this field, including accident models, high reliability, resilience engineering and systems-theoretic analysis. That vocabulary mixes paradigms, theories, models, methods and tools; the two-axis taxonomy preprint on this site codes 181 named entities by the field they address and the kind of knowledge object they are, and the interactive entity atlas lets readers browse them.
Related concepts
Safety-II Resilience engineering Swiss cheese model STAMP and STPA
Read on The Health Topics
- From Models to Methods: A Two-Axis Taxonomy of Safety Science Models, Frameworks and Tools (Preprint)
- Safety Science Entity Atlas: 181 Models, Theories, Methods and Tools on Two Axes (Interactive)
- Understanding Safety Science: Key Theories & Frameworks
- A Meta-Theoretical Maturity Framework for Safety Science Research
- The Safety Case: An Introduction (101)
References
Aven, T. (2014). What is safety science? Safety Science, 67, 15–20. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ssci.2013.07.026
Hollnagel, E. (2014). Is safety a subject for science? Safety Science, 67, 21–24. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ssci.2013.07.025
Le Coze, J.-C., Pettersen, K., & Reiman, T. (2014). The foundations of safety science [Editorial]. Safety Science, 67, 1–5. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ssci.2014.03.002
Cite this entry: Kurutkan, M. N. (2026). Safety science. In The Health Topics glossary. https://healthtopic.org/glossary/safety-science/
Articles that discuss this concept
15 articles on The Health Topics use this concept; the 12 that use it most are listed. The list updates as new articles are published.
- A Meta-Theoretical Maturity Framework for Safety Science Research 21
- Understanding Safety Science: Key Theories & Frameworks 18
- Visual Representation of Sociotechnical System Paradigms: A Critical Evaluation of the Scoping Review by Bogna et al. (2026) 8
- Safety Science Entity Atlas: 181 Models, Theories, Methods and Tools on Two Axes (Interactive) 6
- Safety Culture and Climate: A Review of Research 3
- From Models to Methods: A Two-Axis Taxonomy of Safety Science Models, Frameworks and Tools (Preprint) 3
- Safety culture, safety climate, and safety performance in healthcare facilities 2
- AI Strategies for Hospital Fall Prevention 2
- The London Protocol: Advancing Clinical Incident Analysis 1
- Accountability for Safer Healthcare: Lessons from Other Industries 1
- Collectivism’s Impact on Safety Reporting Intention 1
- Assessing Risks in Dental Clinics: Expert Insights from Spain 1