SafetyInsights.org

“You’re biased” is probably a common expression on social media debates. Noting this, decades of research has highlighted that everybody has their own heuristics and biases. Indeed, biases are essential for functioning in a complex world. It’s not a dirty word, but does have important implications. Nevertheless, a “perceived asymmetry in susceptibility to bias” exists.… Continue reading The bias blind spot: Perceptions of bias in self versus others

This systematic review evaluated whether Root Cause Analysis (RCA) is an adequate method to help decrease the recurrence of avoidable adverse events (AAE) in healthcare. 21 studies (from an initial pool of 127) met inclusion requirements. Results: Overall, this study found that “Although early studies suggested that RCAs are effective in promoting ideas for preventing… Continue reading How much of Root Cause Analysis translates to improve patient safety: A systematic review

As an alternative lens to yesterday’s post on the evidence surrounding safety culture interventions (* and however one wants to define the target of these interventions – safety culture, culture of safety, organisational culture focused on safety, managing culturally etc.), I’ve cherrypicked a few items from Reiman & Rollenhagen’s 2014 paper which explores some of… Continue reading Some debate around the construct of ‘safety culture’

This paper systematically reviewed evidence on the effectiveness of workplace interventions in improving safety culture (performance). 23 peer-reviewed studies met inclusion for review. Providing background, they note: ·        Safety Culture (SC) has many definitions and conceptualisations. One common definition is “shared values (i.e. what is important) and beliefs (i.e. how things work) that interact with an… Continue reading Evaluating the effectiveness of workplace interventions in improving safety culture: A systematic review

When you post a lot on LinkedIn, you’ll inevitably run into various criticisms, like biased research/methods/views. Confirmation bias, hindsight bias, outcome bias, overconfidence etc are also thrown around(which fair enough, we should apply critical lenses and thinking to research as with any part of our lives). Another that is used, albeit less frequently, is the… Continue reading Systematic review of evidence around the Hawthorne effect

This evaluated the quality of annual work health and safety (WHS) disclosures by the top 100 companies listed on the Australian Securities Exchange and with an aim to determine if a mandatory reporting framework would improve standards. Annual reports from the 100 companies over 2018-‘19 was included. First the author provides some background on metrics… Continue reading Evaluating the quality of WHS disclosures by ASX100 companies: Is mandatory WHS reporting necessary

Just read an interesting paper titled “How Not to Run an Incident Investigation” from Cassin and Barach (hard to resist such a title…) I’ve extracted two tables that may be of interest. Image 1 covers some perceived disparities between “assumptions of the investigation models” versus local rationality of work. For instance, an assumption could be… Continue reading Better incident investigations and local rationality

This studied perceptions of risk & links to behaviour of UK construction site dumpers and Subject Matter Experts (SMEs). 40 construction site dumper drivers and 7 SMEs ranked their perceived risk of various scenarios encountered during dumper operation. It’s argued that risk perception is a poorly specified hypothetical construct, where people can be cued into… Continue reading Risk Perception and Risk-Taking Behavior of Construction Site Dumper Drivers

This paper systematically reviewed the published evidence surrounding underreporting of worker injury and illness and the contributing factors. 20 studies met inclusion criteria from a larger sample. Predictably, numerous caveats and limitations were present in the quality of evidence and risk of bias. As always, read the paper for the full results. Results Overall the… Continue reading Underreporting of workers’ injuries or illnesses and contributing factors – a systematic review

A 2008 paper I read reviewed literature around perceived justice in incident reporting in organisations. They constructed the attached figure (image 1) to highlight proposed antecedents and consequences. For one, they note that organisational justice varies as a function of both formal attributes of decision-making as well as informal/social aspects of decision-making. For instance, “people… Continue reading The meaning of justice in safety incident reporting