The significant role inattention plays in safety incidents

For the last 50 years, traditional safety management has improved safety performance by: • Fixing the environment (eliminating the hazard). • Improving the system (more/less rules, procedures etc). • Making safety more conscious (more/better interactions about the importance of safety). Although these approaches certainly have merit, and may be part of an overall solution, they are not enough to prevent many modern-day incidents. Today, these three approaches are used more than before, and are used better than ever before. Yet, workplace fatalities in Australia have stagnated from 2013 to 2019, as have the number of incidents, even serious ones. In the USA, workplace fatalities have increased by 15 per cent in the same period.