This Monday Tech Talk will discuss the common causes of incidents at the workplace. The workplace can be dangerous, even more so in an industrial environment. Numerous factors can cause incident/accidents, ranging from overexertion to mishandling of hazardous materials. There are also a multitude of variables that can contribute to or influence a workplace incident.
- Employees are injured every minute in a workplace worldwide, resulting to in billions of Rands spent on property damage, health and costs and compensation.
- We need to ask ourselves, why do these accidents, incidents and injuries happen?
- So various experts have tried to explain this question by developing theories on causation of accidents.
INCIDENT INVESTIGATION PURPOSE
The overall purpose of an incident investigation is to: ascertain the causal and contributing factors of an incident, near miss or hazard. determine and implement corrective actions to prevent re-occurrence.
Herbert Heinrich’s Domino Theory
Heinrich’s domino theory illustrate the sequence of an accident leading to an injury in a fixed and logical five step sequence.
- Social Environment: people learn through socialisation and ancestry. Through this process they develop certain personality characteristics, such as stubbornness, moodiness and recklessness which could influence behaviour and thereby create unsafe actions.
- Fault of the Person: As with social behaviour, people’s ancestral characteristics may influence them to behave in a specific manner, thereby creating an unsafe condition that could have a hazardous or dangerous consequence, such as an injury
- Unsafe Act or a mechanical/physical hazards: Unsafe act are committed by people who do not necessarily realise that they are committing an unsafe act or who are not really thinking about their actions as they perform the task.
- Accident: an accident is an unforeseen, planned, uncontrolled event that result in harm., injury and damage to people, property equipment and environment.
- Injury : An injury is referred to as a state of being ill, unhealth and or not in good condition.
Frank Bird Jr updated domino theory
- Lack of control: management is considered to be dangerous domino in accident causation and is leading the cause of accident in workplace owing to inadequate standard, programme and follow-up
- Basic causes: By recognising the basic cause of accidents management is able to develop control systems to manage these basic causes are;
- Personal factors; These include a lack of knowledge or skill, poor motivation and physical
- Job related factors, these include inadequate work and maintenance standard, purchasing standard, improper machines and equipment use
- Immediate causes: By identifying the immediate causes of accident, management is able to implement control measures. Immediate causes identified as symptoms of more dangerous underlying problems.
- Accident: an accident is an unforeseen, planned, uncontrolled event that result in harm., injury and damage to people, property equipment and environment.
- Injury: An injury is referred to as a state of being ill, unhealth and or not in good condition.
Take a look at the 9 classes below and their subdivisions, along with a few examples of the labels and types of materials.
Presented by: Keabetswe Maubane
Follow us on our social media pages: