How the Field of Human Factors Helps Solve the Riddle of Serious Injuries and Fatalities

Process and occupational safety are often treated as distinct endeavors, with the former tending to focus on facility system function and the latter on individual worker wellbeing. Though other differences certainly exist between the two, both endeavors are generally purposed to prevent incidents that can cost lives, health, time, and money, in addition to employee morale and public trust. The overarching thesis of this paper is that the field of Human Factors is uniquely positioned to effect positive change in both of these major safety categories.

The backdrop for our argument is the recent finding that while injury and illness incidence rates published by the Bureau of Labor statistics have decreased in recent years,the occurrences of serious injuries and fatalities have declined at a significantly slower rate. We discuss possible explanations for this finding but note that regardless of the preferred explanation, the trend should motivate scientists, engineers, and other safety professionals to revisit long-held accident causation theories holding that near misses – these are incidents that could have resulted in serious injuries and fatalities but did not – are precursors of future serious incidents. While this idea still has merit, the just-mentioned statistics warrant reconsideration of the relations between serious and less-serious incidents to explain why the rates of the two are not decreasing in lockstep. We suggest these data indicate additional (human) factors are involved.

To address this riddle and to support our general thesis, we (a) review core tenets of process safety, occupational safety, and the field of Human Factors, (b) point out that the human is always an element common to both process and occupational safety contexts, and (c) discuss how preventing or mitigating human error can benefit both. We offer specific examples from both safety contexts to show how Human Factors perspectives and techniques can help. Examples touch on standards, policies, and other administrative controls (e.g., procedures), human-machine interfaces of both workplace hardware (e.g., valves) and software (e.g., SCADA systems), environments (e.g., physical, regulatory, and cultural), and communications between personnel (e.g., elements of team resource management). We conclude that fundamental Human Factors considerations can help prevent and mitigate human performance gaps and therefore increase the rate of reduction in serious injuries and fatalities in both process and occupational safety.