HOW CAN WE DRIVE DOWN INCIDENT RATES BY THE USE OF INCIDENT RECORDS AND DATA BASES?

摘要

This paper is written in a provocative manner as another wake-up call to the industry as a whole. The challenge is to revert to the more open era of accident information and data dissemination that existed during the 1970s by directing effort, and of necessity money, with the objective of improving the learning process both inside companies and on a global basis. The paper examines a number of incidents, some of which have not been found in the public forum, that have recurred in the past both globally, inside an industry and worse still recurring inside a company. It also uses the more significant findings from the OECD Workshop on "Lessons Learned" with the objective of identifying some of the reasons for the repetition of causations from an analysis of the past incidents and so to propose some possible means of enhancing and disseminating the already depth of data in the data bases. The OECD Workshop also identified some practical difficulties in Data Mining and proposed some actions. These difficulties included, amongst others, definitions. Further the analysis of real incidents spread over 30 years indicates that there are some organisational problems, which also include, amongst others, dissemination of information to the correct place, its relevance and also internal (management and cultural) issues. The overall objective of this paper is that it will set the Industrial accident statistics (including that of the Process Industry) on a downward path, without resort to new Regulations.