Several tools are available to safety professionals for promoting a systems' view of safety incidents, as opposed to the blame game. These tools are useful not only for analyzing safety events, but for developing action plans that address systems and processes and put the focus on positive leadership.
Most companies employee these tools to analyze incidents that either resulted in an injury or resulted in a close call that could have been a more serious incident. Before conducting an analysis on the incident, the first step is a clear, objective description of the events leading up to the incident, a description of what was done by whom at each step of the relevant events, and the results that occurred as each step was taken. This is an important endeavor, but many companies still struggle with getting a complete, objective narrative description of the events leading up to an incident. Yet, a detailed description of context is critical to conducting a good analysis of the causal factors.
Other sources of data may also identify the precursors of serious injuries. Many companies have an approach similar to our Serious Incident Prevention® (SIP®) approach that include (1) a process for identifying serious injury precursors from multiple sources of safety data, (2) tools for analyzing the data that result in action plans that addressing hazards and prevent future injuries, and (3) leadership review. Serious injury precursors should be identified from multiple sources, including, but not limited to recordable injuries, hazard reviews, BBS observations, employee suggestions, among others. a complete, objective narrative description of the events related to the precursor Regardless of the initial source of data used to identify the serious injury precursor, a complete, objective description of the chain of the events is critical to a successful analysis using any of the tools described below.
