Mishap/accident/incident reporting

The necessity to report mishaps, accidents, and/or incidents to the contracting agency should, at face value, be obvious. In fact, the occurrence of such unfortunate activities... 

On the other hand, voluntary incident reports are shown as not very useful in their current form for evidence-based modeling. They may only be useful in the way that they are currently used, as the alerts for possible hazards in the daily operation of shipping. In order to make the incident reports useful for accident modeling, first they need to be prepared in a more systematic way that can address the causality of the mishaps, and second a more consistent definition of near-miss situation needs to be defined to reliably assign occurred mishaps to a specific type of accident. 

An incident is the occurrence of an unexpected event, which is generally undesired, where the outcome does not result in serious damage, injury, death, or loss. An incident is considered to be a near miss to a serious accident or mishap, which would have more serious consequential outcome. An incident is similar to a mishap in that it is the outcome resulting from an actualized hazard however, in this case, the hazard is only partially actualized, thus precluding any loss or damage. If complete hazard actualization had taken place, a mishap would have resulted. Documenting and analyzing incident reports and near misses are important in system safety because an assessment may reveal a previously unidentified hazard. 

On the basis of Nagel s (1988) information processing stages, 71 per cent of the 284 accidents studied were considered to involve human error, whereby 22 per cent were eoded as information errors, 35 per cent as decision errors, and 43 per cent as action errors (O Hare et al., 1994). However, a different picture emerged when the mishaps were divided according to accident severity. Of the 34 accidents in which there was a fatality or serious injury, 62.5 per cent were attributable to decision errors, while only 25 per eent involved the action stage (O Hare et al., 1994). Of the 169 cases involving minor/non-injury occurrences, only 30.5 per cent were the result of decision errors, while 45.6 per eent were attributed to action errors. These results closely mirror those reported by Jensen and Benel (1977) in their examination of NTSB reeords between 1970 and 1974 in whieh the majority of non-fatal incidents appeared to involve perceptual-motor factors, whereas most fatal accidents were associated with decision-related factors (Jensen and Benel, 1977). 

Make time for the interview as soon as possible after the accident, and, if possible, perform the interview at the scene of the accident. By interviewing the employee as soon as possible after the accident, the employee s recall is sharper. And, not only is the incident more vivid in the minds of the victim(s) and observers, there is less chance for family or friends to influence the way the mishap is reported. 

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