Beliefs about accidents

Paradigm changes necessarily start with questioning the basic assumptions underlying what we do today. Many beliefs about safety and why accidents occur have been widely accepted without question. This chapter examines and questions some of the most important assumptions about the cause of accidents and how to prevent them that just ain t so. There is, of course, some truth in each of these assumptions, and many were true for the systems of the past. The real question is whether they still fit today s complex sociotechnical systems and what new assumptions need to be substituted or added. 

This belief that accidents are inevitable and occur because of random chance arises from our own inadequate efforts to prevent them. When accident causes are examined in depth, using the systems approach in this book, it becomes clear that there is nothing random about them. In fact, we seem to have the same accident over and over again, with only the symptoms differing, but the causes remaining fairly constant. Most of these causes could be ehminated, but they are not. The... 

Our attitudes and values determine the meanings we find in what we observe. A study of some widespread misleading attitudes toward accidents may help show why people react to facts so differently and seem to always have accident problems. Listed below are some misleading beliefs that determine individual attitudes and values about accidents. 

A prior distribution specification Application of population variability analysis requires specifying the prior distribution defined over the parameter space of the chosen variabhity model, representing the prior belief about the variability distribution before the evidence (accident database) becomes available. Some authors propose that the prior be specified in the form of a... 

This popular but ineffective approach to injury prevention is based on the intuitive notion of "accident proneness." The strategy is to identify aspects of accident proneness among job applicants and then screen out people with critical levels of certain characteristics. Accident proneness characteristics targeted for measurement and screening have included anxiety, distractibility, tension, insecurity, beliefs about injury control, general expectancies about personal control of life events, social adjustment, reliability, impulsivity, sensation seeking, boredom susceptibility, and self-reported alcohol use. 

There is one problan that needs to be addressed here. Correlations do not specify the direction of cause and effect. The foregoing discussion has carried the implication that the attimdes and beliefs measured by the survey influence behavior in such a way as to make accidents less likely. In fact, the reverse might be the case at a site with very few accidents, employees might begin to form more positive attitudes and beliefs about the safety system. Thus the results may be driving the attitudes, rather than the attitudes driving the results. 

At the Safety Technology 2000 symposium held by the American Society of Safety Engineers in June of 1995, many of the papers presented made specific reference to or alluded to an accident causation concept. From a review of those papers, it was obvious that the beliefs of safety professionals about concepts of hazards-related incident causation are far from consensus. These are the extremes in the variations expressed on incident causation in those papers ... 

Then came the behaviorists and the management systems people, who have had a significant influence on the safety profession. Their premises are based on the belief that about 90% of all industrial accidents are caused primarily by employee unsafe acts. Some safety professionals, being greatly influenced by those who profess that the worker is the problem, give minimum attention to the influence of design and engineering decisions on incident causation. 

To try to avoid road safety myths. Some road safety beliefs are not based on fact. For example, many people believe that the chaos outside schools at entering and leaving time is dangerous but there is very little road accident data to support this myth. A study in Sandwell in the West Midlands revealed that about 20% of child casualties occurred on the journey to school but almost none occurred within 500 m of a school. 

Eduard Buchner made substantial contributions not only to organic chemistry but also to biochemistry. About half of his 120 scientific publications are dedicated to his research in biochemistry, and in fact, he is regarded as one of the fathers of modem biochemistry. In 1897, Eduard Buchner (together with his brother Hans Buchner) discovered quite by accident that fermentation could occur outside living cells, thus disproving a long held belief, asserted by Louis Pasteur in 1860, that fermentation is inextricably tied to living cells. His chance discovery, which opened the door to modem biochemistry, led him to the award of the Nobel Prize for chemistry in 1907. 

However, the Improvement Manager had an opportunity to test out his belief in this new behaviour-based approach while trying to help a shop-floor worker who had suffered numerous injuries in the past, and was again injured as a result of carrying out a task in an unsafe manner. Rather than resort once more to disciplinary action the individual was required to take part in discussions about his potentially unsafe versus safe job-related behaviours. Once agreement had been reached on the desirable safe behaviours the worker was continually reminded of these, by his shift supervisor, several times during each shift. This individual remained accident-free over the following year. 

What sorts of beliefs do supervisors and managers have about what causes accidents and how does that affect how they try to manage them ... 

Belief. Information about an object, person or situation (true or false) linking an attribute to it, e.g. that machine guards are a hindrance to production, that accidents are caused by careless workers. 

Michael Busby s eyewitness account of the Saudia 163 accident is given in http //www. scribd.com/doc/38040625/Death-of-An-Airplane-The-Appalling-Truth-About-Saudia-Airlines-Flight-163.1 have corresponded with Mr Busby and 1 am in no doubt about the sincerity of his belief that the presence of King Khalid s plane was a significant factor. 

The irony of this stretches belief. It also says something about the working environment at Texas City refinery that a mere one month without a lost-time injury was considered sufficient to merit a celebratory lunch. Also, Ido not understand how this is consistent with the claim of "zero lost time accidents in 2004, unless the celebratory lunch was something that had happened every month for a long time. 

Like many industrialists in the Progressive Era, Herbert Dow believed, or at least espoused the belief, that most industrial accidents were the result of worker carelessness. Although he had not shown much remorse about earlier plant accidents, Dow seemed truly distressed by the rate of injuries among his employees in the mustard gas plant. He noted at least two minor injuries every day, and the accidents led Dow to establish hospital facilities for the victims of the gas burns. The hospital consisted of two refurbished rooms in the Dow Company s education building. A local doctor attended the hospital until an army doctor, Lester L. Roos, arrived at the end of May. Local nurses staffed the hospital rooms... 

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