Enhancing Safety Through Reflective Learning

Think about what matters most to you in the world - your partner, your friend, your children. Now think about how they would feel if you came home injured from work or worse didn't come home at all!

Weak signals are subtle signs or indicators which may indicate that some of the barriers intended to prevent an incident are failing or missing. Weak signals can be observed in equipment, human factors and near misses.

During incidents, many of the barriers that cause the incident have a human element to them. Unfortunately, an incident can happen to the best of professionals, if theses barriers fail.

Chronic unease means noticing those weak danger signals and responding to them in a much stronger way, it means knowing when to think fast and when to think slow, using our expertise to think quickly in familiar situations, but also being able to stand back and take the time to think things through when we need to.

In this course, we will talk about the deadly dozen. The deadly dozen refers to twelve common conditions that can act as precursors to human error; leading to incidents. These conditions can influence people to make unintentional mistakes.

We want everyone to stay safe at work. Most days as we go about our routine everyday duties it is all plain sailing, as we try and do the right thing. However, there is always a risk that things can go wrong and in the blink of an eye, life can change. We all try to do everything we can to stay safe, and we all try to take care of our equipment ensuring that it is well-maintained and operating safely. Yet, despite this, we still experience failure of equipment which causes incidents often with severe consequences.

The marine industry takes safety very seriously, however, in spite of our best efforts incidents do unfortunately still occur, particularly during mooring. A marine insurance industry report shows that mooring incidents are one of the most frequent personal injury causes.

We all live with hazards every day and as a team, we work hard to try and prevent them by taking sensible precautions every day to reduce our exposure to hazards. Thinking about the hazards that might be around us, is a very human thing to do. It's that sense of caution that makes us look for hazards, work out how to prevent them and best of all, remove them altogether. You can use something called the hierarchy of control to help you do just that. It helps you to think about the choices you can make to deal with all kinds of hazards in a step-by-step way.

In this course, we will learn the importance of keeping our barriers strong and understanding when some of these barriers may be weakening. We will watch a video that will go through two very different scenarios with very similar outcomes and then analyse this video to see what could have been done better.

We all find ourselves doing things in a specific way without knowing why just because we have always done it that way or that is what everybody else does or that is the way it is done locally. Over time, in doing this, we just stop seeing the risks and therefore do not challenge our actions. This is called collective normalisation because we all do it and it becomes common practice.