By the mid-1990’s, increased local and international economic competition, deregulation and decentralisation, and the pressure to achieve more with fewer resources, led to significant changes in the way safety at work was organised and managed by the organisation based OHS generalist. Safety was not the only profession to be part of these changes: engineers, technicians, industrial nurses, environment officers, rehabilitation and injury management officers, quality managers and others were also swept along in a wave of restructuring, rightsizing and organisational consolidation. Combined with increased regulation, contracting and outsourcing, flattening of management structures and rapid technological change, these social and economic pressures tended (especially in larger organisations) to see the integration of such positions and responsibilities into mainstream management. While many specialised positions (such as occupational physicians, ergonomists, occupational hygienists and occupational health nurses) continued, many generalist safety professionals found their role changing.

Additional responsibilities were added to many job descriptions, and basic technical skills in OHS needed to be augmented with knowledge of other technical areas (such as environmental management and injury management) as well as basic business skills. As the traditional discipline barriers diminished, the safety, health and environmental (SHE) professional emerged.

This person needed a different set of skills than the traditional safety specialist. SHE personnel still needed the specialist skills that were relevant to the traditional safety problems (for example, dealing with the problems of manual handling, overuse syndromes, hazardous plant, hazardous chemicals, noise, infectious agents, waste disposal, and so on), but they also needed a higher level of management skills to match their new roles in the organisation and technical knowledge of new areas such as environmental protection emergency planning and rehabilitation.

While some organisations still have separate OHS and Environmental departments, the merging of the disciplines and the commonality of issues and techniques for dealing with them means that OHS professionals need knowledge and skills relating to the environment and environmental protection (EP) and environmental professionals need knowledge of workplace health and safety matters.

The SHE discipline has been established as a separate discipline, but needs further development. Safety, health and environmental professionals have similar roles:

In parallel with changes to the safety profession, there has been a growing recognition of the importance of managing all risks in organisations through formal risk management systems. Safety and protection of the environment are recognised as risks that must be managed by persons such as operational managers, human resources personnel, technical officers and engineers who therefore, also need SHE knowledge. It is questionable whether those individuals engaged in SHE activities as part of their general management role had sufficient expertise to undertake these risk management activities.

Furthermore, there was a need to expand traditional non-SHE educational programs to produce practitioners and professionals who could provide such competencies, skills and expertise for the organisations in which they were employed.
Safety health and environmental management is increasingly being seen as a critical part of an organisation’s risk management activities (it consistently ranks in the top five organisational risks perceived by general risk managers) and risk management methods are increasingly becoming the core of the way in which SHE is managed.