Quote:
Originally Posted by Mimpe
I've never felt comfortable with Prof Reason's "swiss cheese safety" description. It implies that environments such as aviation and medical care are naturally benign, with multiple protections in place, all functioning to optimum. Sounds nice on paper.
Ummm, if that's your takeaway from the Swiss Cheese Model, that of a benign environment withe perfect safeguards then I know why you don't feel comfortable with it. It's because you don't understand it at all. Not even a little bit. Seriously. The inherent assumptions are that the environment is fraught with peril, and the safeguards are imperfect.
That's the whole reason he used *swiss* cheese, as opposed to cheddar because *swiss* cheese has many large holes in it. You see; those holes in the slices of cheese are metaphors for defects, flaws, sub-optimalities, to use your parlance, in the safeguards.
With you all the way A Squared. I was wondering how to put the sentiment myself and you came in just a few minutes earlier.
It's interesting how Reason's model gets dismissed by some - but it's just a model that puts sometimes abstract things into an easily understandable form. One of the real benefits of doing a quick (or detailed) risk analysis is that you start to understand what can go wrong and what there is in place that can stop it happening....and then to identify more things that we can do to reduce the risk. For many working in aviation, it's the way we work - day in and day out - and have done for years, from long before SMS was a trendy buzzword (alright, a trendy acronym). But for some others the model can help distil a whole bunch of things into some order. Use it if it's useful, don't if it isn't - but don't dismiss the model, particularly if what it's telling you is that you need to do more to mitigate the risks.