Do Leadership Walkarounds (LWs) positively impact operational, cultural and clinical outcomes? Another systematic review (in healthcare, again) suggests ‘Yes’. 12 healthcare studies met inclusion criteria. First, they noted based on prior evidence: ·        A prior lit review found that LWs were generally effective in informing leaders on safety issues that impacted front-line staff and patients ·        LWs… Continue reading Leadership walkarounds and performance improvement

This explored via interviews with 33 employees their experiences with using an incident reporting system (RUO; reports of unwanted occurrences) and the barriers to reporting incidents. Previous research was first covered in the paper. Issues of trust and blame inhibit reporting, as is also related to solidarity between colleagues. Other factors include unclear reporting guidelines,… Continue reading A study of experience feedback from reported unwanted occurrences in a construction company

Not much to add here – images 1 and 2 are excerpts from one of Dekker’s papers that I found interesting; and an image on different figurative ‘ages’ of safety evolution from Pillay et al. Note: You probably shouldn’t take image 1 too literally, but it serves more as a general indication of how science… Continue reading The evolution of safety science

Another healthcare study that explored what incident investigation approaches are used to generate recommendations, how recommendations are generated, what types of recommendations are generated and how the quality is assessed. 11 studies met inclusion criteria for review. Providing background: Results Overall, this study found that: 2. As seen below, training and education was the most… Continue reading Exploring the “Black Box” of Recommendation Generation in Local Health Care Incident Investigations: A Scoping Review

This coroner’s report detailed the death of a man during hydroblasting of a tank, where he fell through an open and unprotected hatch. There’s quite a few more extracts from this report included here, but it’s worth the read. Regarding fatigue and working hours, the coroner observed that: More generally, the coroner was critical of… Continue reading Coroner blasts overuse of JSAs, unknown safety processes, and fantasy fatigue management

An interesting conference paper that explored how a permit-to-work process operated in practice in the oil & gas industry. They drew on the distinction between WAI (work as imagined) and WAD (work as done), and also my own concept of artefacts acting as enabling devices (from my first Safety Science publication). The study observed a… Continue reading Safety Artifacts in Oil and Gas Industry: An Analysis of Permit-To-Work Process

What percentage of safety performance is explained by the elements of an SMS? New study to be posted soon finds ~30% of performance explained by SMSs. Data from 359 Singaporean construction companies was evaluated to explain the determinants of safety performance, and particularly the interaction of safety climate and SMSs. Overall they found that: ·       An SMS… Continue reading Safety Management System elements account for ~30% of construction safety performance

What is the quality of investigation corrective actions? Pretty poor, according to data from one industry. A new study from 2023 to be posted soon assessed >4k corrective actions from incident investigations from across 11 studies in healthcare. Overall, they found that:    ·        Based on the 4k corrective actions, the vast majority “largely focus[ed] on individuals’… Continue reading Incident investigations not found to improve safety or quality in new data

A very interesting study which compared the attributions of accidents to “human error” compared to three other non-error classes: “mechanical failure”, “technical failure” or “computer error”. Two experiments utilising 971 online participants in study 1 and 1195 participants in study 2 read one of 50 real news excerpt stories which the authors had modified to… Continue reading Attributions of accidents to “human error” in news stories: Effects on perceived culpability, perceived preventability, and perceived need for punishment

Certification to OHSAS 18001 is associated with subsequently enhanced safety improvement, according to a recent US study funded by Harvard Business School. This study used annual BLS incident data from >230k establishments and data from 10 major international certification bodies spanning 1995 to 2016. The authors used a longitudinal design and control group of non-certified… Continue reading Certification to OHSAS 18001 leads to safer workplaces, new study finds