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Therese Harris reports: <<... an engineer has questioned whether we really
need to include the cautionary part of steps that are done over and over
again. That is, when calibrating or adjusting the machine, the operator must
repeatedly raise and lower pneumatically-driven parts. Each time the parts
are lowered or raised...>>
It's a tough tradeoff, isn't it? If you don't repeat the warning, you can
guarantee that anyone who gets hurt will sue you: "You put a warning here,
but didn't put one there, so I assumed it was safe here!" A good lawyer
could win that kind of lawsuit I imagine. On the other hand, if the warning
repeats too frequently, it's like the boy who shouted "wolf" in the fable:
the reader eventually ignores you. The only times I've gotten hurt
performing a repetitive task is when I got so numbed by the repetition that
I didn't pay attention to what I was doing, and I can offer anecdotal
evidence that this is a serious risk in industry: a friend's father told me
once about a guy who got both arms caught in a hydraulic press because of
exactly this kind of problem. He wasn't the only one who lost a lot of sleep
trying to get those images out of his head.
What you really need is a solution that combines the repeated warning with
some way of making the warning stand out. I'm not sure that this is
possible, but one way to at least minimize the intrusiveness of the repeated
warning is via an icon. For example:
- start each procedural description by explaining the main warning icon
(here, a simple drawing of two surfaces coming together with a hand in the
middle): "Warning: In this procedure, the moving parts can easily crush
parts of your body. This icon labels all steps where such accidents can
happen. Do the following to keep yourself safe: [description]"
- repeat the icon beside each step that poses this risk (to the left, so
that it's read before the reader reads the step itself)
The ideal (i.e., not likely to be achieved) solution is to fix the process,
not the person who does the process; for example, the engineers could
conceivably add a scanner to the machine that stops the hydraulics if
anything other than the specified part is present beneath the press. More
realistically, an examination of the machine might reveal a means of
teaching the worker to keep their body parts clear as a learned reflex
action. If you understand how the procedure must be done, you can describe
it in such a way so that the "push the part under the press" step always
concludes with "remove your hands from behind the gate before going to the
next step".
Trainers can use this to take advantage of learned responses: once the
reader repeats the procedure in this manner a hundred times, they eventually
pull their hands out of the press to complete the step, and this becomes an
unconscious reflex they no longer have to think about. (Having just learned
to drive stick shift after 25 years of driving automatic, I can confirm how
surprisingly quickly something can become a reflex action.) At that point,
it no longer matters whether workers ignore the warnings you've placed in
the instructions: they've conditioned themselves to never be in a situation
where the warning is relevant.
<<factory workers get so much safety training anyway, that we are beating a
dead horse and losing credibility because of it>>
Contact your local OSHA (Occupational Safety and Health Administration) or
NIOSH (National Institute of ...) office and ask them for statistics on how
many workers are maimed at work daily across North America. I think you and
your engineer will both get a real eye-opener. (Most plants I've visited
have large "X days without a serious accident" posters. Often, X is
considerably less than a year.) I worked for a couple years co-chairing a
federal WHMIS (Workplace Hazardous Material Information System)
implementation as the employee chairman, and the consultants who helped us
had an endless repertoire of stories about how badly trained many workers
are, and how even well-trained workers are often forced by their employers
to work under unsafe conditions. You can't solve that problem through
documentation, but you can at least offer workers one more chance to save
themselves.
--Geoff Hart, FERIC, Pointe-Claire, Quebec
geoff-h -at- mtl -dot- feric -dot- ca
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