Human Factors and Safety and Quality (?)

In 1986 Briggs Phillips published a small, probably near forgotten, but important study in laboratory safety (see in Laboratory Safety: Principles and Practices.  ASM Press 1986).  The author was able to identify two groups of people: one group of 33 who had experienced at least one laboratory accident in the last 2 years, and another group of 33 who had been accident free during the same 2 years.   The two groups were matched by job classification.    

The two groups were interviewed and surveyed for additional information.   

While not matched for the following characteristics, all including age, years of education, years on the job, weight, height and gender and marriage status were identical.  In addition, wearing glasses, medication use, showed no differences.  Also of interest, accidents outside the laboratory, and driving records were also equal.  

The factors that had significant differences were (A) smoking  (B) the number of accidents and injuries and infections acquired in the 2 years prior to the current 2 years (C) personal attitude towards safety (D) opinions of the safety awareness of their supervisors and co-workers, and (E) importance of training and communication versus personal experience.  In all these, the accident involved were more likely smokers (remember this was 25 years ago), had a long history of accidents,  believed that technique was more important than attitude, but thought that personal experience was more important than training.   

The accident free group were significantly more critical of the supervisors and significantly more critical of their co-workers safety consciousness, and believed that safety attitude and awareness were more important than having techniques and equipment.  

[If you are safety aware you will avoid getting into the high risk behaviour of rushing or allowing distraction.  If you are not safety aware, you are more likely to assume that equipment will allow you to go faster and increase risk.]

The message of the study points to importance of attitude and awareness in the avoidance of having a laboratory accident or injury.  

So why am I bringing up 25 year old studies?  Two reasons.

First, a recent study in ASQ’s Quality Management Journal V18, N:1, 2011 on factors associated with continuous  improvement in patient safety  by E. Naveh et al came to a similar finding of the relative importance of opinions on attitude and priority.

Secondly, and more importantly, what made the first study possible was that records were maintained on who had been involved in a laboratory accident or injury.  In many laboratories today, we have virtually no records of Quality accidents, and where we do have records,  the names of the people are commonly deleted.  So in many (most?) laboratories if we wanted to study the human characteristics associated with increased error, it would be impossible because we have no place to even begin.

Deming wisely called to “Drive out Fear” and I agree with that.  He also said that most error was systemic, and I agree with that too.  But Quality in the medical laboratory is a new field, and it is important that we study why errors occur.  Confidentiality is important, and so if avoidance of a sense of retribution.  But let’s not “throw the baby out with the bathwater”.  Continuous improvement requires having data to study.

That’s why they call it PDSA.