Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
emerging problem before it actually became one. Theories like the
High Reliability Organization (HRO) and Hearts and Minds operate
successfully on this level.
Paradigm 3: Safety will increase if people take personal responsibility for
their own and others
'
safety.
This breakthrough again helped people reduce the number of inci-
dents, but the incident rate has stabilized at a certain level of OSHAs
1
during the last few years. Among some, there is a belief that, although
it is not easy, work free of incidents is possible. Strangely enough, we
now have the same discussion as those at the onset of safety manage-
ment, only the subject has changed slightly. At that time, those who
thought that work without fatalities would not be possible challenged
those who had the ideal of a workplace free of them. The only differ-
ence in the discussion is that we now talk about incidents instead of
fatalities. Fortunately, the idea that all people can leave their work in
the same health as they began is winning support. As in every break-
through in thinking, a solution that is the result of more of the same
approach does not work. We need a new, fourth paradigm shift to cre-
ate brain-based safety.
1.4 SAFETY MANAGEMENT LEVEL 4
The crucial question now is how do we create this new breakthrough
in management thinking? A problem with a paradigm shift is that you
don
t see it until you have made it. Fortunately, the history of safety
management can help us.
'
When we analyze the first breakthrough, we see that safety started
with a technological approach focused on building safe systems (for
example, equipment or logistics). Engineers developed the roots of
safety management; even today, we can see that the majority of the
1
OSHA is the abbreviation of Occupational Safety and Health Administration, an American
institute founded after the OSH Act. These days, the expression OSHA is used to refer to a
recorded safety incident and an indicator of the number of incidents per career per employee.
OSHAs can be weighted in categories, varying from fatality to first aid. Unfortunately, there is
no generally accepted standard OSHA index. In this topic, the OSHA index of 1 indicates that
every employee or contractor has the probability of being the victim of one incident during
200,000 hours of work. On a site of 1,500 employees and contractors, this would be the equivalent
of 13 incidents per year.
