Ending the Checklist Approach to Safety Inspections

Phil La Duke — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 16:22:27 GMT

Many times during training, I've noticed that people conducting safety inspections miss key hazards because they are looking for something on a mental checklist. Instead of viewing the work place holistically they tend to focus on one hazard category and subconsciously ignore others.

To prevent this dynamic, I've taken to teaching hazard identification by asking a couple of key questions:

What happens here?
People tend to tell me what work goes on in the area ("this is a deburring station") so I clarify the question. I ask the inspector to describe in detail the work—lifting, walking, material flow, handling parts, attaching fasteners. By getting the inspector to describe in detail the basic elements of the process it forces him/her to move away from the checklist and really think about the forces and inputs that go on in the are.

What could go wrong? What injuries have you had in this area in the past?
Typically the person who is inspecting a work area is keenly intimate with every possible problem one is likely to encounter in his/her work area and will be quick to tick off a list of process failure modes complete with a list of triggers. From there it's easy for the inspector to scan the area for these triggers.

What doesn't belong here/what is out of place or out of process?
By zeroing in on the sources of process variation we teach the inspector to focus on the critical few hazards most likely to seriously injure workers. This technique is also useful for eliminating the tendency to "pick the low-hanging fruit" and ignore those issues that tend to be more difficult to anticipate or readily observe.

What has changed since the last time you toured this area?
Once the root causes of the process hazards have been identified and corrected the inspector effectively only has to pay attention to the things that have changed. On a side note, I start every incident investigation with the question, "what was different in this case than in the way this operations is usually done?" I typically get a resolute "nothing" to which I respond, "were that true either the worker would never get hurt or would get hurt every time. And since neither condition is true, there must have been SOMETHING different in this case." Differences represent process variation and where there is process variation there is heightened risk.

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Ending the Checklist Approach to Safety Inspections