Citation

Horberry TJ, Cooke T. J. Health Saf. Res. Pract. 2010; 2(2): 8-20.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2010, Safety Institute of Australia, Publisher LexisNexis Media)

DOI

unavailable

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

After incidents have occurred in any high hazard work environment, undertaking detailed investigations to help learn lessons for the future is a priority. Part of such an investigation often involves obtaining an incident narrative by means of an interview with the operators involved: the accuracy and comprehensiveness of this process is vital. The Critical Decision Method (CDM) is a structured and in-depth interview process that can be used to elicit information from operators about their decision-making and problem-solving processes during incidents. Following CDM’s successful use in other industries, it was hypothesised that capturing and analysing information on equipment-related mining incidents and the operators’ decision making around these incidents would result in valuable extra information compared to the most commonly used investigation technique in mining. The CDM was adapted to the mining context, and data were collected from operators involved in previous incidents at two coal mine sites. The main findings of the research supported the anticipated beneficial use of CDM, and showed that it is a useful tool to ‘get in the head’ and better understand the mindset of the personnel involved in incidents. The method is of increasing value with more complex incidents. The research also found that CDM uncovered important details not in current incident investigation reports: such information could have key benefits to help fully understand and learn lessons from the incident. Further work with this technique to integrate it into future incident investigations is strongly recommended, so achieving more detailed and operator-centred accounts of such incidents.