THE ACCIDENT-PRONE

Ellesmere Guardian, Volume LVI, Issue 80, 22 October 1935, Page 4

THE ACCIDENT-PRONE

"It is common knowledge that some people are more liable to accidents than others," says the British Industrial Research Board in a recent report. "The board's investigators, however, have shown that accident proneness obeys definite laws. These laws are constant, so that from the distribution of accidents in one occupation it is now possible to pr-edict the likelihood of accidents being similarly distributed in another. Tt is no longer a theory but a fact that, given similarity in exposure to risk, in every occupation which has been analysed by the board's investigators roughly three-quarters of the recorded accidents happened to one-quarter of the people who were exposed to the risk. This has been found to hold true not only for accidents occurring in the factory or shop, but also for domestic accidents in the home, and even for the chances of getting a foreign body in the eye! The phenomenon, therefore, is a personal one, and independent of conscious action or blameworthiness on the part of the possessor of it. Not much is known about the particular charac-

teristics which go to the physical or | mental make-up of the accident- | prone person, but certain factors, j especially those connected with quick | muscular reaction, have been and are being elucidated in the course of the work on the preventive tests. Four j years ago the investigation was extended to include drivers of motor vehicles; and from a statistical examination of the road accident records of four groups of bus and private drivers, totalling 2604 persons, it appeared that in each group the incidence of accidents corresponded to the distribution which had previously been found to hold good for industrial and other accidents. This distribution held true for all accidents, including those in which the driver was exonerated from blame. A closer analysis of a small sample showed that those who sustained an undue number of one kind of road accident tended to sustain an undue number of accidents of other kinds, and that their accident rate continued to remain high as time went on. Further, that the elimination (on paper) of those who sustained an undue number of road accidents in the early days of their exposure to risk reduced the accident rate of the whole group in subsequent periods. Practical application of this knowledge is fraught with many difficulties, many of which have already been discussed with the Ministry of Transport. The possibility of obtainihg data from insurance statistics that would assist the further investigation of accident proneness among drivers of motor vehicles has been explored. It was thought that since the introduction of third party insurance, the Insurance Companies might have figures from which the personal accident rate of owner-drivers could be compiled. It appears, however, that such figures could only be obtained with extreme difficulty, if at all. Insurance companies insur.e cars, not people. They have no information as to mileage driven by individuals, i.e., amount of individual exposure to risk or the environment circumstances which may make driving more dangerous at one time or in one place than at another. Any car insured by them may be driven by several persons, and, owing to the existence of the no-claim bonus systems, many trivial accidents—and for the purpose of considering accident proneness it is immaterial whether an accident be trivial or serious—are not reported."