Increasing the understanding of industrial accidents: an analysis of potential major injury records.
Understanding the causes of industrial accidents will be limited if only incidents which produce injury are studied. We examined the records of 514 Potential Major Injury events over a 20-year period in one plant. Injuries were sustained in 228 (44%) of them; 286 (56%) could be classed as "near-miss" incidents and were not associated with injury. Human error accounted for most incidents and was a more important factor among those with less experience on the job. Overall, third party injuries resulted from only 5% of incidents but from 11% of those caused by human error. Although the number of human error incidents fell by 19.5% between the first and second 10-year periods, their relative importance increased as the company managed to reduce incidents of equipment and structural failure even more. We suggest that the term Critical Incident is the most fitting for the first of a series of events in the spectrum of accidents.
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D000062:Accidents, Occupational / Q000145:classification / Q000706:statistics & numerical data* / Q000639:trends; D015984:Causality; D006801:Humans; D012189:Retrospective Studies