WorkSafe Forum 2007

"I don't think we can eliminate human error."

- Dr. Albert Boquet (keynote speaker)

SUCCESSFUL & VALUABLE. Those are the words I'd use to commend WorkSafe WA for their 2007 showcase targeted at the Safety and Health Rep. Six hundred delegates were present and involved in the theme, Creating a Safety Culture at Work. Fremantle Ports sent eleven people to the Forum including four safety reps. [FP sent invites to all safety reps, and further to all employees.]

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There were three (3) great plenary sessions including a rev-up from Tony Cooke (Chair, WA Commission for OSH) preaching the Safety Is No Accident message. He related that he first saw the slogan and 'stole' it from the Graham Farmer Freeway, though I suspect the first time he actually saw it was at Hamersley Iron in the 1980's where "Safety Is No Accident" was their by-line. Tony's impassioned message was very pertinent and a perfect note to end the day. "We need real (collaborative) effort." His plea was for managers and supervisors to get the same training as their safety reps. Another key message was looking back 'we've come a long way' from the negative days in the early 1980's. Since Robens the OSH landscape has gradually improved... there's still much to do as evidenced by the amount of people killed and maimed each day, month, and year from injuries at work.

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"Every statistic is a broken body."

- Tony Cooke

Tony also went on to say that injuries and illnesses cost Australia approx. $8 Billion per annum ($3 Billion in known Workers' Compensation and Injury Management); and an estimated $5 Billion through tax system liabilities (when the worker goes onto sickness benefits etc) and the uncharted family costs------of course we all should know that injuries and illnesses arouse costs in the non-monetry sense, particularly suffering.

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Keynote Speaker, Dr. Albert Boquet from the USA spoke on human factors involved in accidents. How many of us have driven tired (lots)? How many of us have had crashes due to tiredness when driving (not many). His point was people make mistakes all the time, yet our systems never capture this data simply because the workplace environment doesn't embrace the fact that humans make mistakes--it's frowned upon. The prevailing culture in industry is to 'hide mistakes'.

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Our challenge is to make better use of "human error events" and design our systems so that these are reduced, or so when errors are made they do not have catastrophic consequences.

Dr. Boquet lamented that the systems approach to safety is backed by "fact-driven research" but the human factors approach to safety was often based on "fad-driven research." The typical response to incidents is that human factors are rarely captured and the fix is normally "more or better procedures"--this approach fails nearly every time.

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The Human Factors Intervention Matrix is a cube model covering both systems, human factors and practicability measures and would be an ideal addition to our incident management systems.

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If we have fatigue problems we need to address the human factors front on, and talk about the elephant-in-the-room issues, like napping and low risk tasks restrictions etc.

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"Everyone makes mistakes."

- Dr. Albert Boquet

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It is time our systems tackled this fact and began 'engineering out' the human factors element as far as possible.