Posted By Andy Brazier
The European Process Safety Centre (www.epsc.org) held a two day conference on Learning from Accidents in October 2008. I'm not sure how much help it would have been to you directly, but it does show you are not alone in your concerns.

Having attended (and spoken at) the conference I concluded that one of the problems in the industry is that we have got much better at finding the causes of accidents, but don't actually implement the learning very effectively. It is almost as if the we end up making the solutions quite complicated when in fact they are often very simple. This may be because we are rather technology driven and forget that actually it is the little things like talking to people that make the difference.

One thing I would ask is whether these recurring accidents are really so important? If it is minor things that are cluttering up your statistics it may be that you are simply better than most at getting things reported. The question is, are you equally good at getting high potential incidents and near misses reported? I guess what I am trying to say is that minor accidents will happen (no matter whether we set a target of zero or not) and so we need to keep them in perspective.

Posted By Pat Hannaway
Richard,
below is a link to site for the roads / quarry industry. It uses a shared knowledge of accidents / incidents as the basis of learning outcomes for health and safety in their industry.

http://www.safequarry.com/index.aspx?

It may be worth a look.

Pat