Can people be responsible for their own safety? Part 2

Making safe behaviour a habit

Can you think of an injury you’ve had where you were not in at least one of the four states (rushing, tired, frustrated or complacent) and you were looking at what you were doing, thinking about what you were doing, aware of the line of fire and conscious of losing your balance, traction or grip? That question has been put to more than 1.5 million people around the world and not many legitimate scenarios have been identified that don’t involve the four states and the four critical errors.

This shows that people making unintentional mistakes is a significant factor in them getting injured. The research tells us that this states-to-error pattern associated with unintentional or habitual mistakes is involved in more than 95% of acute injuries.

Have you ever seen an incident report where the corrective action is that the person “be more careful”, “pay more attention”, “be more alert” or “needs to be counselled”? If you have, it is a pretty strong indication that it wasn’t the hazard or a deliberate ‘at-risk’ behaviour that led to the incident. It was unintentional and/or habitual at-risk behaviour. Once people understand and look for this state-to-error pattern in themselves, their family members and their coworkers, they’ll see it everywhere because it is very common.

So what can we do about it? Human error prevention teaches people four critical error reduction techniques to minimise human error by up to 95%. Since so much of our behaviour is habitual, the most powerful technique is to teach people to work on their habits. The first step is to get the person to identify those habits that are not the safest, then get them to realise what the safer habits are and finally get them to put time and effort into changing.

When organisations live the critical error reduction techniques, they can achieve up to 90% reduction in incident rates within 12 to 18 months. An Australian company was able to reduce LTIs by more than 90%, recordable injuries by more than 85% and first aid cases by more than 60% within 18 months.

By Cristian Sylvestre, a Director of SafeTrain, an OHS&E consultancy specialising in human error prevention; a human error prevention specialist; and Vice President of the NSW Division of the Safety Institute of Australia.