Prevention of occupational accidents today : what expectations towards models

Prevention of occupational accidents today no longer seems the overriding concern in the prevention of occupational risks. Yet they still cause each year about 700 000 lost-time accidents. The decrease in their number was notably accompanied by a change in their structure and nature of accident factors. The concomitant evolution of the modeling of accident phenomenon has contributed to these advances.
After defining the model concept and clarified its scope, this article examines the expectations of models of accident given the reality of occupational accidents today and the need to increase their prevention.
In 2008, there were in France, about 70% of accidents with lost time that are bumps, sprains, jams, falls (with or without difference in level), pain during movement or effort. About 5% of them are falls from height and 34% of accidents occurred during manual handling. One of the immediate causes of these injuries is not an energy identified as inherently harmful and external to the victim but the energy of motion of the victim herself. In addition there is often a hazard called "circumstantial" because a priori compatible with the human presence in usual situation. Virtually all work activity holds potential risk of this kind of accident. Statistics show, however, that preventive measures implemented to improve safety at work have not benefited as much these accidents as other occupational accidents. In the proposed model, the notion of "circumstantial hazard" allows to highlight the impossibility to implement the safest barriers to prevent injury and also the difficulties of assessing a priori this kind of accident. In addition, the recurrence of certain combinations of accident factors suggests the feasibility of quantitative models capable of predicting occurrences of the same type of injury. So injury caused by the energy of motion of the victim could then be anticipated
Using a model for accident prevention is conditioned by the characteristics of the model, including the nature of accident factors and the links between factors, the level of generality, the gap reflected by the model between the work situation without accident and the modelised accident and its ability to predict the occurrence of other similar events. These features are discussed here with special emphasis to the risk of movement disturbance mentioned above. It clearly appears an interest to models that meet local needs expressed in a sector of activity, type of business or a given company.
In the field of safety, the current literature mainly addresses the risk of a major technological accident seen as a product of variabilities in usual operation. Like the major technological accident, injury caused by the energy of motion of the victim is often the result of the presence at a particular time of a novel combination of usual factors which are not subject to formal requirements. A model of this type of injury becomes a tool for identifying accident-prone variabilities in situations. Individuals, groups and organizations can take profit of knowledge of these variabilities to prevent the same kind of accidents.