Accident Data

Unit 01 – Health & Safety

BTEC Construction In The Built Environment
Level 3
Hugh McLelland
Aims & Objectives
 By the end of this lesson you will understand:-

 The need to collect accident data and how this

influences change
What causes the most fatal accidents
on a construction site?

 Write down your answer

You have a new job
 You are going to work anywhere you like in Europe,
select the country where you would most like to
work (this is a site based job)
What is an accident?
 Unintended and untoward event
 Unplanned, unexpected event, in a sequence of events; it
results in physical harm, injury or disease to an individual,
damage to property, a near miss, a loss, or any
combination of these effects
 A failure of a person to cope with the true situation
presented to him.
Who cares?
 Victim
 Governments
 Researchers
 Employers
 Safety managers and other professionals
Accident Prevention

 Hazard Identification
 Risk Assessment
 Controls

 Tools for Occupational Health and Safety

Management
Reasons for collecting accident
information
 Analysis of past accidents, patterns and trends
 Accident investigation
 Accident notification requirements (the law)
 Insurance company requirements – claims
management
 Allocation of blame

 Collecting information = accident investigation

Accident Investigation
 Purpose
 To prevent accidents happening in the future
 To determine the immediate (proximate) AND the
underlying (distal or root) causes of accidents
 Methods vary
 Systematic look at all contributing factors
 Outcomes
 Focus on the root cause as opposed to the
consequences or a scapegoat
 Conclusions linked to what actually happened
 A list of recommendations for change
Law

 Injury and illness prevention is a legal requirement

 Accident reporting to a competent authority is a
legal requirement
 Accident investigation is not a legal requirement
 Analysis of organisational data is not a legal
requirement
The cost of work-related accidents
 5,500 people killed annually in Europe
 60 people killed annually in Ireland

 500 million working days lost in EU as a result of

accidents
 4.7m accidents resulted in absences of more than
three days in EU
Direct costs of workplace accidents

 Employee lost time

 Medical and hospital costs
 Compensation and liability claims
 Legal costs
 Insurance costs
 Replacement costs (equipment, products,
personnel)
Indirect costs of workplace accidents
 Cost of time lost by  Cost of interference
other employees who with production
stop work
 Cost die to ensuing
 Cost of time lost by
loss of profit
supervisors
 Overhead cost of
 Cost of first-aider time
injured employee
 Cost of injury to
equipment or spoil to  Administrative costs
materials
Accident Statistics
 National and international
 Classification schemes
 Local
 Recording procedures

 A single major accident can dramatically alter

accident statistics
Accident Causation Models
In groups investigate the following:-

1.Heinrich’s domino model (1920s)

2.Bird’s loss control model (1960s)
3.Hale and Hale’s model (1971)
4.Reason’s organisational accidents model (1990s)

 There is NO universally accepted model

 Causes are generally seen to be at individual
level or organisational level (work activity,
working environment and organisational factors)
Accident Causation
 Accidents usually arise from a particular
combination of circumstances, not from a single
cause (but it is often necessary to attribute a
principal cause)
 Accidents often preceded by near misses
 No one causitive factor is implicated in all
accidents
 There are wide variations in the consequences
of similar accidents/incidents
BIRD Accident Triangle (1969)

Major injury

1 Minor injury

10
Damage only
30

600 No injury or damage

Accident Investigation Tools
 MES – multilinear events sequencing
 ECFC – Events and causal factors charting
 FTA – fault tree analysis
 MORT – management oversight and risk tree
 STEP – Sequentially timed events plotting
 SCAT – Systemic causal analysis technique
 CMT – causal tree method
 WAIT – Work Accidents Investigation Technique
 …and many more…
Accident Research

 Accident causation models been developed since

early 20th C
 In the past two decades accident research has
focused on major accident analysis
 Emphasis is shifting towards ordinary and
frequent accidents
Factors
 Financial considerations often lead to the choice of
work method
 Environmental conditions, examples of this could
be trying to complete a job quickly because its
raining
 Job roles, the employee may be insufficiently
competent to complete the task
 Could age attributes and experience be
contributing factors
 What is the attitude of the employee?
 Is the employee fit to work?
How does data change Health and
safety?
 Consider your earlier identified cause of fatal
accidents, consider what regulations have changed
to try and avoid future accuracies of accidents in
this area
Lesson Recap
Accident data is showing a high number of accidents
of workers over 65 and under 18 falling from roofs,
what could be done to change this?
A high number of eastern Europeans are being killed
in accidents, suggest how this could be tackled?