Issue link: http://psai.uberflip.com/i/1159010
W EEKLY EDITION AUGUST 21, 2019 Building a Culture of Safety Part I: Precursors to Seri ous Inc id ents By Karleen Kos, PSAI Executive Director …Continued from page 1 In this article, the first in a series on building a culture of safety at your company, we're going to take a look at whether there are things – beyond the o bvious like failing to wear PPE or walking into moving traffic - that can help you actually predict whether a serious safety incident is likely. Spoiler alert: there are. Precursors. They say, "prevention is the best cure." So let's start there. Who wou ldn't prevent an accident or incident if they could? Nobody wants to get hurt or killed – and employers certainly have a vested interest in protecting employees and the bottom line. Yet these accidents and fatalities happen. When they do, often you can loo k back and "see the stupid." For example, one portable sanitation company leader told me about an employee who the very day after a safety meeting focused on safe work behavior was seen ducking under a train stopped on a railroad track and walking between the cars. When the appalled employer asked why the employee did it the response was, "I had to get to the other side and it was just sitting there." Digging deeper, the employee felt time pressure and wanted to get back to work. She knew she had to get a c ertain amount of things done by the end of the day and that was more real to her than the possibility of getting crushed by a moving freight train. Now, time pressure doesn't necessarily cause accidents, but when accidents happen, time pressure was often a factor. That's what we mean by precursor in this context. It's not something that causes the accident, but it is something that – in hindsight – was a factor. Identifying accident precursors. Can you predict when accidents will happen? William R. Corco ran, writing for the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine explains how precursors affect accidents. […] a precursor is an event or situation that, if a small set of behaviors or conditions had been slightly different, would have led t o a consequential adverse event. Has there ever been a consequential event, near miss, or infraction/deviation that did not have a precursor? In some sense of the word, probably not. Have there been consequential events with precursors that have been disco unted, dismissed, not recognized, or not understood? Most certainly. P AGE 8 CONTINUED ON PAGE 9