SafetyInsights.org

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

This systematic review evaluated the evidence surrounding behavioural interventions in improving safety injuries and incidents. All the usual precautions about the stability of incident data remain. 19 studies met inclusion criteria. While I’m not a proponent of behavioural approaches, I post this in response to comments on LinkedIn about how “behavioural/BBS programs don’t work”. I… Continue reading Effective Components of Behavioural Interventions Aiming to Reduce Injury within the Workplace: A Systematic Review

What is the relationship between network resilience (* capacity for) and actual project performance? A 2016 study to be posted in the coming weeks explored this relationship across three mega-projects. Overall: ·        Networks with better interaction and structure have higher resilience indices to risks ·        Higher (network) resilience indices correlated with better actual safety performance ·        Network structure,… Continue reading Network resilience, communication and better actual safety performance

Should we count crows or errors? The late, great Bob Wears discusses some challenges with a myopic focus on “error”. Post in the next couple of weeks. He focuses on the matter in healthcare, saying that despite the push for innovation, the industry “remains trapped by old ideas [of human performance]. He says that this… Continue reading Error counting and old ways to think about human performance