This evaluated the associations between a contractor safety prequalification assessment program on leading/lagging indicators. The assessment included Safety Management System [SMS] scores, Safety Programs (eg falls, hearing protection], Special elements (drug testing, return to work], history of OHSA citations, and various injury metrics. Safety assessments from 2198 construction contractors were included. Results Increased SMS scores… Continue reading Testing the associations between leading and lagging indicators in a contractor safety pre-qualification database

This paper analysed the use of the Take 5 (Last-Minute Risk Assessment, STOP, SLAM etc.) based on interview and field observations at a major infrastructure construction project. Data collection occurred during alternating periods of enforced Take 5 usage, optional Take 5 usage, and banned Take 5 usage. There’s so much in this paper that I… Continue reading Should We Cut the Cards? Assessing the Influence of “Take 5” Pre-Task Risk Assessments on Safety

Given my recent bias posts, I wanted to balance this with more posts on the effective use of heuristics; most of the time, in most situations, our heuristics (and biases, since bias isn’t a dirty word) help us navigate the world. Gigerenzer provides several examples of heuristics (image 2), their conditions, and how they perform… Continue reading Heuristics that make up the cognitive ‘adaptive toolbox’

This study explored safety performance and network resilience among construction teams. Data came from three mega-projects in the Middle East using Social Network Analysis. Resilience (** capacity for resilience) was observed via actual safety performance data and overall network resilience, simulation through agent-based modelling. Providing background: Results Overall: The findings suggest that “Better resilience is… Continue reading Exploring associations between resilience and construction safety performance in safety networks

Does investigator experience help mitigate bias in accident investigations? A study to be posted in the coming weeks suggests not – finding that more experienced professional investigators were more biased than laypeople when it came to implicating worker action as causal in the accident. That is, experienced accident investigators were more likely to blame workers… Continue reading Professional accident investigators attribute more blame to workers than laypeople, exhibiting a “human error bias”

Take 5, STOP, SLAM and other Last Minute Risk assessments seem like a good idea in principle, but how do they work function in practice? Not so well, according to one study. I finally summarised Havinga, Shire & Rae’s 2022 study which empirically explored the functioning of Take 5 during a trial at a major… Continue reading Do Take 5, Last Minute Risk Assessments etc. work? One study suggests not so well.

This explored the perspectives of 44 healthcare workers regarding the effectiveness of RCA-based interventions/controls, using a Resilience Engineering framing to understand the realities of their everyday work. The study argues that a shortcoming of traditional event-analysis investigation is that they focus on incidents or adverse events – themselves only representing a small subset of hazardous… Continue reading A Bottom-Up Approach to Understanding the Efficacy of Event-Analysis in Healthcare: Paradigm Shift from Safety to Resilience Engineering

This meta-analysis analysed 79 studies to determine whether accident proneness really exists. Accident proneness is the clustering of accident-related health problems in some individuals compared to others. For instance, an earlier study from 1919 “were the first to observe that a relatively small proportion of workers in a British munitions factory had most of the… Continue reading Does Accident Proneness exist? A meta-analysis suggests ‘Yes’

For a brief paper (two pages), this is a hard hitter. The late Bob Wears discusses some challenges with myopic focus on “error”. I’ll use a lot of direct quotes since I can’t put it any better than the author. Fundamentally, he says we can look at human error in two ways. 1.       As a… Continue reading The Error of Counting “Errors”

Can’t remember if I’ve posted this already, but this open access paper systematically reviewed the literature on the efficacy of interventions in preventing work accidents, up to 2015. 100 studies met quality inclusion, representing 31 million pooled individuals in 59 interventions. They found that “Strong evidence supports greater effects being achieved with safety interventions directed… Continue reading Safety interventions for the prevention of accidents at work: A systematic review