Accidents do happen. But one of the key things that we keep missing out on is the root causes behind these accidents. We always tend to look out for the technical things that went wrong, equipment failures etc. However, one of the key things we miss out is that there’s some underlying factors which we call Performance Influencing Factors (PIFs) that influence accident causation. And how these work is there’s factors linked to the way the job or the task has been designed, the personnel carrying out the task or even organisational factors. And when these are not properly designed out as part of your process or your processes, what happens is you trigger human failure in the form of either slips or lapses or mistakes or violations from your operators or workers. And these go on to create an unsafe factor condition, which then leads on to an accident. And of course, if you do not have adequate preventive measures in place or mitigating measures in place, this would keep escalating until it gets to a very Major Accident Hazard (MAH) consequence. Like fatalities — multiple fatalities — as the case may be.
And what we do is we carry out a procedure — or a process — which is called Safety Critical Task Analysis (SCTA). And with SCTA, what it involves is using a structured methodology — that is approved by the UK Health and Safety Executive (HSE) as well as other regulators — to identify the weak points in your system where it is possible for human failure to happen. For example, for somebody to make a slip error or a lapse error or a mistake or a violation. And we design out engineering controls or eliminate the process, if possible. Or design engineering controls or administrative controls or — as the case may be — personal protective equipment (PPE) or any other thing. But what we try to do is to make sure we design out these solutions to enable the hazards or the risks to be either prevented or mitigated in terms of their consequences as well.
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