Safety Thought of the Week

Improving the safety culture requires an integrated approach to safety through coherent actions in three (3) areas:… Membership Required You must be a member to access this content.View Membership LevelsAlready a member? Log in here...

The significance (or severity) of an event depends upon the consequences suffered and not on the error that initiates it. The error that triggers a serious accident … and the error that is one of the hundreds with no consequences… can be the same error.   Human Error, James Reason, Department of Psychology University of…...

Management’s responsibility for controlling the unsafe acts of employees exists chiefly because these unsafe acts occur in the course of employment that management creates and then directs. Management selects the persons upon whom it depends to carry out industrial work. It may, if it so elects, choose persons who are experienced, capable of, and willing…...

Do parents have safety metrics for their children’s safety? Do we put up banners to demonstrate the significance of our children’s safety? I am betting not on both. It is not needed as we naturally VALUE the safety of our children. We may never have the same level of VALUE of safety towards other adults…...

“An operator’s behavior is strongly influenced by their working situation and the human and organizational factors that characterize the situation. If unsafe behavior is noted, the most effective way to prevent it from happening again is to eliminate the conditions that produced it. This implies that time and thought must to given to an analysis…....

“We often hear: “We have to change people’s behavior”. However, behavior is not only the result of an operator’s personality or training. The characteristics of the situations in which a human being is placed make certain types of behavior more likely. Some operating situations can have characteristics that increase the probability of undesirable human behavior…....

“The situation that the worker has to manage is always unique. Even if the prescribed operation is habitual, certain factors are specific to this particular time: the weather conditions, the time and the day of the week, the state of the upstream or downstream facilities, the equipment to be used, a maintenance technician nearby, the…...

“This view of accident causation suggests that unsafe acts are best reduced by eliminating their psychological precursors rather than the acts themselves. However, it must be accepted that whatever measures are taken, some unsafe acts will still occur. It is therefore necessary to provide a variety of defenses to intervene between the act and its…...

“Very few unsafe acts will result in damage or injury. In a highly protected system, the probability that the consequences of an isolated action will penetrate the various layers of defense is vanishingly small. Several causal factors are required to create a ‘trajectory of opportunity’ through these multiple defenses. Many of the causal contributions will…...

“Several recent accidents in complex, high-risk technologies had their primary origins in a variety of delayed-action human failures committed long before an emergency state could be recognized. These disasters were due to the adverse conjunction of a large number of causal factors, each one necessary but singly insufficient to achieve the catastrophic outcome. Although the…...

When reading this, think about the “Swiss cheese model” from Reason and the “domino model” from Heinrich. “Disasters are essentially organized events. To occur, they typically require the systemic and prolonged neglect of varying signs and signals of danger, creating deep pockets of organizational ignorance, organizational silence, and organizational blindness. When signals of risk are…...

This is a great synopsis of how serious accidents build within an organization over time because of the lack of a functioning SMS. When reading this, think “swiss cheese model” from Reason and the “domino model” from Heinrich. Disasters are essentially organized events. To occur, they typically require the systemic and prolonged neglect of varying…...