Two of many studies exploring Root Cause Analysis methodologies in healthcare and whether these investigations prevent repeat occurrences (sources in comments). Study 1 evaluated 21 studies and found: Despite RCAs and investigations being promoted under the guise of preventing reoccurrences, the authors state that “more recent studies do not confirm these findings” (p12), Based on… Continue reading Are Root Cause Analyses (RCA) effective for preventing incident reoccurrences?

This is a really interesting report which explored the extent that Australian major hazard facilities (MHF) had learnt from the 1998 Esso Longford disaster, three years after the event. I’ve referenced this report a lot in my writings, so thought it was time to post a summary. You should be able to freely access the… Continue reading Have Australia’s Major Hazard Facilities learnt from the Longford Disaster?

A really interesting read on the ‘surrogation’ phenomenon, which is where strategies and goals are mentally replaced by the metrics developed to measure the strategy. There’s several papers on this topic which I plan to summarise in the future. As the article notes “Every day, at almost every company, strategy is being hijacked by numbers”… Continue reading HBR article: Don’t Let Metrics Undermine Your Business

This was a brief theory paper describing a new method for scoring the strength of corrective actions with the intention of determining the influence on broader systems change – called the systems change hierarchy (SCH). This summary/paper will be clearer to you if you have a squiz at the Action Hierarchy (AH) methodology from the… Continue reading Beyond the corrective action hierarchy: A systems approach to organizational change

This study explored the common sense approach (CSA) to safety on a large UK construction project via safety climate survey and ethnographic observations. Common sense was defined as the practical knowledge and judgement of workers based on long-term experience, training and experiential learning and being able to behave in sensible ways and make practical decisions.… Continue reading ‘You couldn’t finish the job without breaking the rules’: Common Sense Safety On A Large Construction Project

Some really interesting observations from Jop Havinga, Mohammed Ibrahim Shire and Drew Rae’s recent paper exploring the use of Take 5s in industry (link below). Too many things to cover but I found the attached points (images 1 & 2) pretty pertinent. They observed that while the “official” (work-as-imagined) view of Take 5s is that… Continue reading Take 5 and pre-start risk assessments

This explored the role IT plays in facilitating psychological safety in virtual teams compared between men and women. Providing background, it’s noted that: One study found that some individuals held back correct information on decision errors among their team during virtual meetings In online settings, men engaged in significantly more criticisms and oppositional views than… Continue reading Gender and psychological safety in virtual teams: the role of awareness types enabled by information technologies

This study compared adopters vs non-adopters of certified occupational health and safety management systems (COHSMSs) using cross-sectional survey data from >4k Danish workplaces. Five scales for process-related OHS efforts and seven scales for content-related OHS activities was used to score performance. Process-related OHS efforts are efforts to monitor workplaces and identify hazards and include things… Continue reading Differences in occupational health and safety efforts between adopters and non-adopters of certified occupational health and safety management systems

This evaluated the evidence for the use of wearable spinal posture systems which can provide live biofeedback in clinical practice. 37 studies met the inclusion requirements, which included wearable technology being able to monitor posture in the sagittal and/or coronal planes and published between 1980 and 2018. [I had this written/summarised for close to two… Continue reading The role of wearables in spinal posture analysis: a systematic review

For those in the throes of developing, reviewing or decluttering procedures then the model 1 / model 2 described by Hale and Borys (2013) may interest you (source below, but which originally drew on work from Sid Dekker). In short and to butcher a far more nuanced description but: model 1: sees rules as an… Continue reading Model 1 / model 2 view of rules and procedures