Human Factors Implementation – for Plant Workers

Weak control of human factors leads directly to error. An error can result in an initiating event of an accident sequence (directly by the mistake made or indirectly, such as by a process control loop failing prematurely). Human error is also the cause of failure of each layer of protection. This paper discusses each of the 10 primary human factors and describes what we know about their relative importance in accident causation. The data presented is from basic research by the authors on the root causes of more than 3000 accidents and near misses; and also based on the review on the review of hundreds of accidents analyzed by others and summary data from many companies. This paper lists where focus should be placed (i.e., which human factors tend to be key) for the frontline workers to implement to optimize these selected human factors so that the base human error rate at a site is as low as possible. Case studies and examples are used to illustrate key points.