The Cause of Workplace Injuries

How many different causes, that helped lead to the accident in this clip, can you identify? Was this accident caused only by the worker? Do workers sometimes make "mistakes"? Al Chapanis, a former profession of human factors engineering at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland (U.S.) said, "Everyone, and that includes you and me, is at some time careless, complacent, overconfident, and stubborn. At times each of us becomes distracted, inattentive, bored and fatigued. We occasionally take chances, we misunderstand, we misinterpret, and we misread. These are completely human characteristics. ...Because we are human and because all these traits are fundamental and built into each of us, the equipment, machines and systems that we construct for our use have to be made to accommodate us the way we are, and not vice versa." The fact is, good occupational safety and health practice is based in the understanding that all work-related injuries and illnesses are caused by workers' exposure to hazards. There are no exceptions. In order to have a so-called "at risk" behaviour, there must be a hazard. If there was no hazard, there would be no "risk" and there could be no injury or illness. The goal of workplace health and safety efforts, then, is to find and fix hazards and to understand and change systems of work such as unsafe staffing levels, mandatory overtime/extended work hours and a "push for production" that intensify work loads, create unreasonable work pace and cause workers to work when they are fatigued. For a broader look at identifying the causes of workplace injuries, linked to Hazards magazine at http://www.hazards.org/bs/hazardsbriefing.htm . This is clipped from a 1990s video from the US Postal Service.

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[drbillcorcoran]

Great video for root cause analysis discussion. Shows real life pressures.

The viewers can easily supply the details necessary for root cause analysis discussions.