SafetyInsights.org

Another holiday mini-post (it’s a Festivus miracle!). This is following the theme on fatigue and sleep disruptions. This study looked at the relationship between shift length, sleep and disabling low back pain. Data was via an online survey from >5k workers (survey…yeah yeah I know) Results below – no pretty graphs here, unfortunately. OR =… Continue reading Shift length, sleep and disabling low back pain

More on the links between sleep disruption, fatigue and injury risk. The first image tracks workplace incident/injury rates as a product of hours per week and hours per day from a large US dataset over 13 years. They found a clear dose-response relationship with increasing hours and workplace injury. Interestingly, this wasn’t simply due to… Continue reading Chronic sleep loss and occupational injury

Given the prevalence of zero harm/vision zero approaches throughout industry, I thought this paper may be of interest. It explores an academic critical view of zero harm, shown in the below image. I was going to post a summary but, meh, not sure I can be bothered (maybe in the new year…) For now, you… Continue reading A critical review of zero harm / vision zero approaches

This data may be of interest on the links between daily sleep, weekly working hours and the risk of work-related injury based on US interview data. [** Yes, interview data has limitations worth noting, for instance recall & memory issues] An odds ratio (OR) of 1 equals no difference in risk, whereas >1 is greater… Continue reading Links between daily sleep, weekly work hours and injury risk

This explored the (perceived) factors that facilitate knowledge transfer (KT) on OHS in and between construction firms and suppliers/subcontractors. Data was based on 43 semi-structured interviews with OHS professionals and others with responsibilities for OHS. KT was framed around organisational cultures. Note: although a range of roles were included (CEOs, project managers, supervisors – the… Continue reading Knowledge transfer for occupational health and safety: Cultivating health and safety learning culture in construction firms

The following data highlights the frequency and types of cognitive biases prevalent under two domains: 1) a range of accidents from nuclear, aviation, fire, transport and more, and 2) medical decision errors. Note: Bias in this sense isn’t meant to indicate some human weakness or unreliability, but more simply, systematic deviations away from an “expected”… Continue reading Frequency and types of biases in decision making

This study explored internal supply chain issues within 2 hospitals with the aim of understanding organisational factors that contribute to operational failures. They note that frontline clinicians spend at least 10% of their time working around operational failures resulting from insufficient information, supplies or equipment. It’s noted: ·        Constant exposure to missing resources, which precipitate workarounds,… Continue reading Designed for Workarounds: A Qualitative Study of the Causes of Operational Failures in Hospitals

This study explored human performance in the context of scheduled outage work in nuclear power plants using a situation awareness (SA) taxonomy. Most SA research has focused on individual information processing, knowledge states, decision making and resulting outcomes. However, there are also frameworks that focus on “team situation awareness”, “shared situation awareness” or “distributed situation… Continue reading Situation awareness in outage work – A study of events occurring in U.S. nuclear power plants between 2016 and 2020

An ethnographic study at two large construction sites, which empirically observed the differences between cooperation and discipline. They drew on themes of safety as enforcement and engagement from prior work (e.g. Sherratt et al.) and also power embedded within safety (e.g. Antonsen). That is, how “inconsistent efforts of management to facilitate independence and involvement of… Continue reading Developing safety cooperation in construction: between facilitating independence and tightening the grip

In the world of decision making, thinking, intuition and risk, it’s safe to say that the somewhat negative view of bias and heuristics has become the modus operandi (e.g. the body of work by or inspired by Kahneman and Tversky…but important in its own right) compared to alternative & complementary perspectives. Naturalistic Decision Making (NDM)… Continue reading Fast & Frugal Heuristics