Repeat safety incidents are extremely indicative of management’s safety performance in mitigating safety concerns.
Having repeat safety incidents is clear evidence that management is “missing” or “overlooking” something when they are correcting reported safety concerns. This is bad for safety performance, and it’s bad for audit performance.
On the other hand, the lack of repeat incidents indicates that whatever you are doing to mitigate safety concerns, it’s working. The most important factors in mitigating safety concerns are:
With the above 3 bullet points in place, you can expect to see few repeat incidents. Here are 5 ways that these above bullet points help stop repeat safety incidents.
Understanding the life cycle of safety incidents is the most important first step in learning how to avoid repeat safety incidents. By “life cycle,” we are talking about a safety mishap from the very beginning (root causes) to the end (consequences).
This process is the following:
Risk controls aim to prevent hazard occurrence and risk occurrence by implementing risk controls that:
Understand these three implementations of risk-controlled should also aid you in reviewing how well a particular hazard/risk is controlled.
It is highly recommended that, where possible, you mitigate safety concerns by implementing risk controls that control the root causes of safety concerns. A more concrete way of saying is that:
A hazardous source should not be confused with a hazard. A hazard indicates an inherently dangerous condition. A hazardous source is inherently benign but can become dangerous. Moreover, multiple hazardous sources will generally produce a single hazard occurrence.
A great example of a hazardous source is a flock of birds. By themselves, they are harmless. Place them close to a flying aircraft, and they are a hazard. The same is true of other things like mountains, power lines, etc.
Addressing the root causes with risk controls often involves creating corrective actions that are DETECTIVE and PREVENTATIVE in nature, such as:
Root cause analysis should be conducted on the reported safety issues to ensure that no applicable root causes are going unaddressed. If addressing a hazardous source is not possible, risk controls should also aim to address preventing hazard occurrence or adequately bring safety into an acceptable range after hazard occurrence.
Emergency drills are a prime opportunity to proactively seek out risk controls that are not performing as they should. Emergency drills are used to “stress test” various elements of your emergency response plan (ERP).
An ERP is a comprehensive document that covers all high-risk safety concerns. Oftentimes, ERPs are used to address a handful of the most catastrophic safety concerns (bomb threat, aircraft collision). However, ERPs are best used to address a whole number of catastrophic AND high-risk concerns, like:
Risk controls that relate to high-risk safety concerns are some of the “most important” controls in your organization, as they prevent the highest damage safety incidents. Doing drills assures that these controls are performed.
Regularly reviewing and inspecting risk controls is something every program should do. This involves a couple of things:
Reviewing risk controls has three goals, to identify:
Having relevant risk controls and up-to-date in your SMS program is like having a strong immune system.
Whereas regularly reviewing risk controls is done periodically, monitoring risk controls is an activity that happens daily as issues are submitted.
When issues are submitted, quality SMS programs will have little trouble identifying risk controls that are relevant to the issue. At this point, controls should be rated as:
Risk controls with negative outcomes should be closely scrutinized and investigated further. Risk controls with negative outcomes on repeat incidents need to be replaced.
This guide should prove a valuable resource to help you monitor your SMS program, including risk controls:
Last updated January 2024.