Preventing Accidents

Press, Volume CVIII, Issue 31781, 11 September 1968, Page 16

Preventing Accidents

The correspondent (to whose letter he was replying) and the secretary of the Canterbury branch of the National Safety Association (Mr G. V. Williams) were not as far apart as some readers might suppose in their ideas about the emphasis that should be given to the purposes of Accident Prevention Week. The correspondent argued that attention should be focused on the prevention of injuries, a suggestion rather more reasonable than the justification he offered for it: because “ a great deal of time is spent “ during safety instruction in an endeavour to impress “ upon people that injuries are seldom caused by “ accident but by carelessness or neglect ”. This, of course, confuses a specific with a general meaning of the term “ accident Accidents must comprehend all kinds of mishaps, actually or potentially damaging to human life or property or both. Most accidents are preventable—if human responsibility for their causes could be traced back far enough—and neither the correspondent nor Mr Williams was disposed to accept the false philosophy that “ accidents are bound “to happen ”. But one accident may be caused by the inattention of the moment, another by the carelessness of someone in a factory on the other side of the world many months previously. Rightly safety authorities recognise that a few accidents are beyond their power, or the power of those immediately involved, to prevent or ameliorate. The worst consequences of even this kind of accident may be averted by alertness and by the careful observance of safety rules which try, however contradictorily, to insure against the unforeseeable. Perhaps this was what the correspondent had in mind when suggesting that the prevention of injuries rather than the prevention of accidents should be the public’s main concern. Nevertheless, the National Safety Association is abundantly justified in concentrating on the elimination of accidents, the great majority of which are avoidable by the exercise of ordinary standards of care and vigilance. The fewer the accidents, the fewer the injuries. But the best reason for concentrating on the prevention of accidents—or on eliminating the causes of accidents—is that people must be reminded constantly of their responsibilities to their fellow-citizens. Carelessness in the factory or workshop, as on the roads, .usually imperils the lives of others no less than it imperils the life of the culprit.