Prevent Accidents Before They Occur

The only way to ensure that accidents and their consequences are tackled at the source is to identify and eliminate the workplace risks before, rather than after, the event. To be truly effective, safety activities must be integrated into the day-to-day business and become a way of life for management and employees. This book provides a blueprint for creating an active safety culture that prevents accidents before they occur and becomes the key component in an ongoing safety success. 

Often, ironically, our successful efforts to eliminate or reduce accidents contribute to the march toward higher risk. Perception of the risk associated with an activity often decreases over a period of time when no losses occur even though the real risk has not changed at all. This misperception leads to reducing the very factors that are preventing accidents because they are seen as no longer needed and available to trade off with other needs. The result is that risk increases until a major loss occurs. This vicious cycle needs to be broken to prevent accidents. In STAMP terms, the weakening of the safety control structure over time needs to be prevented or detected before the conditions occur that lead to a loss. 

The point of system safety is to prevent accidents/incidents (the difference between which lies only in the result) before they occur. Safety lessons are there to be learned so as to prevent the next incident becoming an accident. 

Leading indicators are those measures that can be effective in predicting future safety performance (Dupont Corporation 2000). Leading indicators can be considered before-the-fact measures. These measures assess outcome actions taken before accidents occur and are measures of proactive efforts designed to minimize losses and prevent accidents. Leading indicators can help uncover weaknesses in the organization s operations or employee behaviors before they develop into full-fledged problems. 

It is especially important to identify and evaluate the underlying causes to prevent substandard acts and conditions from occurring. Some ways to identify evident causes before they result in accidents are relatively simple. However, short of doing systems audits, it is more difficult to identify underlying causes before accidents. The most practical way to do this is to properly train those who investigate accidents in investigation techniques and accident causation. In addition, it helps to have a quality control process in place to measure whether or not these causes are identified appropriately. 

Of course, even a low level of preventive effort by a railroad will not mean that an accident occurs during every trip. A regular commuter will go many years, or even decades, before they are involved in an accident. (In the event that the commuter suffers a fatal injury, this new information may come too late to affect their travel-demand behavior ) Nevertheless, accident probabilities may be inferred from more readily observable attributes of service such as operating practices, minor operating problems, the condition of equipment, on-time performance, and the demeanor of employees. 

This concept is also important for reporting minor accidents or near misses. Minor accidents and near misses are excellent opportunities to obtain free chances to prevent larger accidents from occurring in the future. It is much easier to correct minor problems before serious accidents occur than to correct them after they are manifested in major losses. 

Tools are such a common part of our lives that it is difficult to remember that they may pose hazards. All tools are manufactured with safety in mind but, tragically, serious accidents often occurs before steps are taken to search out, avoid, or eliminate fool-relafed hazards. In the process of removing or avoiding hazards, workers must learn to recognize the hazards associated with specific types of tools and the safety precautions necessary to prevent those hazards. (See Figure 25-17.) All hazards involved in the use of power fools can be prevented by following live basic safely rules ... 

Our discussion of cognitive dissonance might give us a potential remedy for this. If we could induce workers and managers to discuss what can go wrong, and in fact advocate the position that an unfavorable outcome would occur, they would be more likely to entertain the idea that an unfavorable outcome (accident) would occur and might modify their behavior to prevent it. In fact this may be the reason for the success of the job safety analysis (JS A), in which workers discuss potential hazards of a task before it is undertaken. 

---