Fear of Reporting

John R. Childress (2009) calls this familiarity blindness  

Executives who have spent several years inside an organization become blind to the culture, mainly because they are a part of it. It s akin to the notion that fish don t have 

One of the biggest obstacles to reporting a safety issue is that the employee is punished, which is a knee-jerk reaction deeply embedded in safety cultures. The excuse here is Well, I would rather discipline him than have to visit him in the hospital. After an accident people become very emotional, and line management automatically look for who caused the accident rather than what caused the accident. 

This discipline is seemingly all that managers know about accident cause rectification. Once again, in a culture of blame for accidents this would seem to be a normal course of action. No safety culture can be built as long as such a situation exists. 

To test the fear factor theory, I interviewed 29 miners and asked them if they would report it if they were injured in a work accident. Twenty-eight said no. Only one said that he would report the injury and that was only if, as he put it, I am so badly injured that 1 can t crawl out to my car in the car park and drive home.  

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However, the steam cars needed up to half an hour to build up a head of steam and required large amounts of water and wood. There was also the fear of reported boiler explosions. The gasoline engine was greatly improved after 1905 and the use of steam cars disappeared. By 1911, White and Locomobile discarded steamers and switched to gasoline engines. 

The same reporting system is vital for other high-risk situations, including lack of proper equipment, machine failure, or other hazards. Often this important feedback of safety information is stifled by the culture of an organization that does not recognize its value and creates a fear of reporting at the workplace. 

While the injury rate may appear to be decreasing, this could be due to many factors such as fear of reporting workplace injuries (the fear factor), manipulation of the rules defining reportable injuries, and other sidelining efforts. In some industries the rising fatality rate is a clear indication that safety is not improving, as fatality rates are the one downstream safety measurement that cannot be manipulated or fudged. 

Quahty assurance must remain independent of manufacturing so that problems can be reported freely to upper management without fear of retribution. QA should have oversight responsibihty for QC. A reporting stmcture helps to ensure the independence of both quahty units and conforms to both Good Manufacturing Practice (GMP) and ISO 9000 requirements. 

A company s culture can make or break even a well-designed data collection system. Essential requirements are minimal use of blame, freedom from fear of reprisals, and feedback which indicates that the information being generated is being used to make changes that will be beneficial to everybody. All three factors are vital for the success of a data collection system and are all, to a certain extent, under the control of management. To illustrate the effect of the absence of such factors, here is an extract from the report into the Challenger space shuttle disaster ... 

Fear of havin0 an accident Television reports about alcohol problems... 

My uncle Clarence s children are kept close for fear of their royal blood, Bess said once. Perhaps Ned and Dickon are but kept closer still. At Middleham or Sheriff Hutton. We would not hear reports from there. Ned was ever a good boy who would do as he was told. He would not plot, or try to escape. ... 

Leaving Louisiana and its racial problems behind, Rillieux returned permanently to France around the time of the Civil War. Fearful of losing their federal subsidies, most Louisiana sugar planters initially opposed secession. Nonetheless, when their state seceded in January 1861, most supported the Confederacy. In the end, the war destroyed their sugar plantations and freed their slaves. According to some reports, Rillieux returned to France before the war, but his closest French associate wrote that Rillieux left the United States after the war, exhausted and asking for nothing but rest. ... 

Selectivity of this kind erases any fears of systemic hypotension and hypoxemia, which is usually associated with other NO donors applied to such model systems. Similar attempts at selective vasodilation have been reported by other groups [94, 95] and further work by Brilli et al. [96] in this field shows how aerosolized NONOates, in combination with surfactant, improve both oxygenation and PVRI in porcine lung... 

A related fallacy is if a company trains enough investigators, near misses will be reported so there is no need to establish a blame-free system. This assumption has been proven false when fear of blame is not addressed. 

A witness may have several motives for purposely modifying statements. Witnesses have information that the incident investigation team needs in order to imderstand the incident and determine the causes. They may choose not to tell the incident investigation team all of the relevant information they have. Sometimes witnesses will purposely modify their testimony or withhold information during interviews. AVhat are some of their motives for doing this Usually they are the same as those for not reporting near misses. The most significant of these influences is fear of punishment. 

WitUn, Gordon. Should You Own a Gun U.S. News World Report, vol. 117, August 15, 1994, pp. 24ff. Uses the question of gun ownership to introduce the overall debate about gun control. The article features a debate between Gary Kleck, whose research shows that gun owners use their guns for defense up to 2.5 million times a year (seldom shooting them) and that criminals are deterred by their fear of armed citizens, and Arthur Kellermann, whose equally provocative study found that guns in the home were 43 times more likely to kill a resident or friend than an armed intruder. 

Studies of patients with panic disorder suggest that those who suffer from panic report having quality of life as poor as that of patients with major depression. Panic attacks and/or fear of panic attacks can interfere with the development of social relationships, personal happiness, and employment. 

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