Safety Improvement Programs
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Every year, thousands of Australians are injured in the workplace with a cost to the Australian economy estimated at more than $34 billion. It is now well established that up to 80% of these incidents and errors are attributed to human factors. The cost to an organisation can be far-reaching, including compensation paid to employees, decreased productivity, higher labour turnover, training costs, increased absenteeism and loss of motivation.
Through the application of the Situational Safety Awareness Assessment, these costly accidents can be mitigated. It is a fast and accurate way of identifying workers who have the right attitudes, abilities and coping skills to display safe practices on the job. There is more evidence on the validity of the SSA Assessment in predicting safe behaviour than any other safety assessment to date.
It measures safety ability, attitudes and coping skills to assess the ability to see, understand and respond to, and avoid unexpected hazards. Sometimes referred to as “Presence of Mind”, a situationally aware individual is characterised by their ability to avoid unexpected hazards and respond in a superior way – as if the situation had been anticipated and a solution had already been worked out.
Specifically, situational awareness involves the three phases of:
- Perception/”seeing” : accurately seeing what is going on around you, what the people, equipment and systems are doing, as well as any other incoming information
- Comprehension/”understanding”: an understanding of the elements of the situation with respect to the operational goals, to form an accurate picture of the environment
- Projection/”thinking ahead”: the ability to project the future actions or outcomes of the elements in the environment, at least in the short term
Situational Safety Awareness is a unique concept that addresses the incident platueu through the key behaviours that result in breakdown of alertness and task performance. While more conventional measures of ‘accident risk management’ or ‘employee dependability’ have been useful, the measures do not explain why even the most positive safety attitude can result in incidents and errors, nor do they measure an individual’s capacity to identify and take steps to mitigate against risks/hazards.
