SafetyInsights.org

This study analysed 10 years of serious and fatal incident investigation reports from four international construction companies to: i)                    Assess the reliability of their Critical Controls (CCs) ii)                   Assess the factors that affect the reliability of CCs I’ve skipped a lot – so check out the full paper. Providing background: ·       The authors in a… Continue reading Determining the Reliability of Critical Controls in Construction Projects

If you’re interested in some ways that our systems fail, and how they can provide false indicators of safety, including audits, then my recent presentation at the Global Safety Innovation Summit 2024 in Wollongong may interest you. tl;dr: we have a lot of data on unsafety, but comparatively less in creating safety. Link: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-jay-allen-show-on-safety-fm/id1377151103?i=1000652636239

This post continues material from the CIEHF’s manual on ‘Human factors in barrier management’. The next set of concerns the authors have with how barriers are constructed, and the role of people perceived is that: 5. Barrier systems rarely take a systems view of human and organisational factors that influence barrier performance 6. The cognitive… Continue reading Human performance and barrier thinking part 2

What is the role of people in creating safety or failure? Is human variability (“error” and the like), a ‘threat’ in bow ties, or does it both challenge or ensure success of our controls? This is post 1 of 3 exploring some tenets around human performance in barrier thinking, taken from the CIEHF manual. First… Continue reading Human performance in barrier thinking: problems with “human error” – post 1

What is the relationship between different types of employee voice and silence, and how are these influenced by psychological safety? This systematic review may interest you – as it explored those questions. Not a summary, as you can read the full paper via the link. First, they identified several motivators and inhibitors of employee voice… Continue reading Silence in organizations and psychological safety: a literature review

This study explored the relationship between organisational factors, supervision, preconditions for acts and worker acts via structural equation modelling. 305 Iranian mining accidents were analysed via HFACS. If you look past the rather normative frame of trying to categorise things via loose concepts like unsafe acts/preconditions etc., you’ll find a pretty progressive and sympathetic paper… Continue reading Effects of human and organizational deficiencies on workers’ safety behavior at a mining site in Iran

Controls, barriers, safeguards, degradation controls…I’m currently in a bit of a bow tie frenzy, so here’s another paper talking about bow ties and barrier terminology. This brief 2017 paper discusses the development of a book, seeking to better standardise terminology in bow ties and barriers. Summary to be posted soon. In short, they state that:·        In… Continue reading Bow ties, barrier & control terminology and more

This interesting study from Dr Roberta Selleck analysed 10 years of serious and fatal incident investigation reports from four international construction companies to: i)                   Assess the reliability of their Critical Controls (CCs) ii)                  Assess the factors that affect the reliability of CCs Summary posted next week. CCs are “specific safety barriers, which (i) directly prevent the unplanned… Continue reading Critical Control implementation & failures in fatal and serious construction accidents

** Pitfalls in risk assessment Part 2 ** Here’s the final list of pitfalls in risk assessments in the paper. ·      Failure to identify all hazards associated with a particular activity – this suggests that while discrete hazards or energy sources may be identified, the particular pathways to failures may be missed ·      Failure to fully consider all… Continue reading Pitfalls in risk assessment Part 2

This 2004 paper covered a number of pit falls and misuses in risk assessment. I’ll break it into two posts. Pit falls: ·      Carrying out a risk assessment to support a decision that has already been made (image 2) ·      Using a generic assessment when a site-specific assessment is needed – here a range of different hazards… Continue reading Pitfalls in risk assessment – part 1