The Swiss Cheese Model of Health and Safety

and how to use it to plug the holes in your safety program

Hello and welcome to this week’s edition of the Safety First Journal.

Hope you had a great long weekend with a chance to get away and recharge.

Let’s dive in.

Established companies generally have some form of safety program in place. This may be a few basic policies and checklists or maybe you’ve got a fully established ISO 45001 compliant system in place. And yet, you still have accidents and incidents. What has gone wrong?

Let’s look at a simple example. Say you have a forklift daily inspection checklist that employees complete daily to protect against mechanical problems. Yet despite this an employee reports a back injury due to excessive vibration on the machine because one of the wheels is badly worn and damaged. You’ve put a plan in place (the inspection checklist) to guard against that very problem yet somehow it fell through the cracks. The first thing to do is thoroughly revie…