Organisational work conditions: health and safety

Psychology A2 · Organisational Psychology. The idea in plain words, the rules to remember, the mistake to avoid and a worked example, written and checked by Mega Lecture.

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The idea

Accidents come from human errors and from system errors. Human errors are of four kinds: leaving a step out, doing the wrong thing, doing steps in the wrong order, or doing the right thing too early or too late. System errors come from the design of the operator-machine system: controls that are easy to confuse and displays that are hard to read invite mistakes.

Safety can be improved by rewarding safe behaviour. In a token economy, workers earn tokens for staying accident-free and exchange them for goods (Fox et al., 1987).

Swat (1997) studied accident records and risk events in industrial plants in Poland to find their causes.

Rules to remember

Omission: a step is not done. Commission: a wrong action is done.
Sequencing: steps done in the wrong order. Timing: the right action done too soon or too late.
Controls should match what people expect (e.g. clockwise = more) and be easy to tell apart by shape, colour or position.
Displays should be clear and visible; important warnings should be placed where the operator looks.
Fox et al.: workers at two open-pit mines earned trading stamps for periods without lost-time injuries; injuries, days lost and costs fell and stayed low for years.
Swat: accident causes were grouped as insufficient supervision, poor workplace organisation, technical factors and human error; poor housekeeping was a common hazard.
Risk events (near-misses) are more frequent than accidents, so monitoring them shows hazards before anyone is hurt.

Common mistake

Students confuse omission with commission. If nothing was done when something should have been, it is omission. If an action was done but it was the wrong action, it is commission.

Worked example

A pharmacist counts the right tablets into the right bottle but sticks on the label for a different patient's medicine. Which type of human error is this?

A label was put on, so no step was left out: it is not omission.
The order of the steps and their timing were normal: it is not sequencing or timing.
An action was carried out, but it was the wrong action.

Answer: An error of commission.

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