What is the Definition of Accident? Explain the causes of accidents?

Pheasant (1991) defines an accident as “ an unplanned unforeseen or uncontrolled event – generally one that has unhappy consequences”.

A dictionary defines an accident as:

·        An event without apparent cause

·        An unexpected event

·        An unintentional act

·        A mishap.

Classification of Accidents: We can broadly classify the accidents in the following ways, 

• Road accidents
• Accidents in the home
• Accidents at work

CAUSES OF ACCIDENTS

 The basic causes of accidents at work place:

1. Inadequate work standards: through a lack of training and supervision.
2. Inadequate equipment or maintenance of equipment
3. Abuse or misuse of equipment, or failure to check equipment.
4. Lack of knowledge (for example in not being able to use equipment correctly).
5. Inadequate physical or mental capacity to do the required job.
6. Mental or physical stress
7. Improper motivation 

 Deskilling

A source of error in the relationship between operators and machines is the deskilling of the workers. There are two ironies here: the first is that many mistakes come from the designer’s initial errors — systems are introduced which have not been properly worked out and which are actually unable to do what is required of them. Second designers still leave people to do the difficult tasks, which cannot be automated so easily.

 

Equipment design:

An illustration of the problem of equipment design occurred during World War 11(1939—45), and it came about because the US air force had concentrated on training pilots to fly aircraft rather than designing aircraft that could be flown by pilots. They discovered, however, that even very experienced pilots were prone to make errors with the poorly designed control systems. 

Human error
Riggio (1990) identified four types of error that can lead to accidents:

·     Errors of omission: failing to carry out a task

·     Errors of commission: making an incorrect action, for example, a health worker giving someone the wrong medicine

·    Timing errors: working too quickly, working too slowly

·    Sequence errors: doing things in the wrong order

If we want to reduce accidents, the obvious thing to do is to examine the errors that people most commonly make, and then change the working practices so that the chance of error is reduced. The problem with this is that most workers are reluctant to report errors because of the consequences for them.

Substance and alcohol abuse
The most commonly cited cause of accidents is alcohol or substance abuse. When chemicals impair our judgement we are more likely to underestimate the risks of a situation, and overestimate our ability to deal with it. 

Lack of sleep
Research shows that (a) errors are more likely in sleep-deprived people and (b) sleep-deprived people need longer to complete tasks.
It is a robust finding from sleep research that sleep deprivation affects people so that they (a) make more errors, and (b) need longer to complete a task 

Other factors that might affect accidents include recent stressful life events, and fear of mistakes.