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Safety optimization in an accident-prone aquatic context: A qualitative study of drowning risk detection by public pool lifeguards
Abstract
Introduction:
Drownings occur in French public swimming pools (PCP) in spite ofconstant supervision by qualified lifeguards. This studyhypothesizesthat organizational aspects may affect the mission of pool supervision andtakes a systemic approach that views safety as an emergent property, and drowning as a multifactorial and long-term process that is not restricted to the end of an accidental sequence.
Method:
We conducted a qualitative survey at four municipal poolsin France based on 30 semi-structured interviews.
Results:
The findings revealed that several interrelated elements influence the detection by lifeguards of bathers in distress: (a) their training, their conception of the profession, and the reasons that led them to enter this occupation; (b) their representations of the drowning risk and the evaluation of their ability to perceive such situations; (c) the question of regulation; and (d) the methods of dealing with this framework in daily operations, which involves trade-offs and appropriations at each level of the system.
Conclusions:
In order to identify the most significant influences, it seems relevant:(a) to shift the focus away from these professionals; and (b) to prioritize an analysis of the functioning of the risk management system as a whole, not just critical or post-accident periods. In order to reduce the risk to swimmers, it seems preferable to identify the source of the constraints that weigh daily on lifeguards in charge of pool supervision.The functioning of PSP's is the end result of joint regulation processes likely to influence, positively or negatively, the identified feedback loops. An analysis of the pool supervision can help to identify early warning signs of vulnerability (which can sometimes be acted upon at low cost),identify the practical implications, and makepreventive recommendations.
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How does domain expertise influence dynamic visual search? Previous studies of visual search often use abstract search arrays that are devoid of applied context, with comparatively few studies exploring applied naturalistic and dynamic settings. The current research adds to this literature by examining lifeguard drowning‐detection across two studies using naturalistic, dynamic search tasks. Behavioural responses and eye‐movement data were recorded as participants watched staged video clips and attempted to identify if a swimmer was drowning. The results demonstrate lifeguard superiority in response times to drowning events, compared to non‐lifeguards. No differences between lifeguard and non‐lifeguard eye‐movements were noted however. This suggests that the experiential benefit in response times results from other underlying processes, rather than any scanning benefits. This research highlights the complex nature of naturalistic and dynamic searches, while demonstrating the robust nature of simulated videos in producing experience effects in visual search.
Although drowning is a common phenomenon, the behaviour of drowning persons is poorly understood. The purpose of this study is to provide a quantitative and qualitative analysis of this behaviour. This was an observational study of drowning videos observed by 20 international experts in the field of water safety. For quantitative analysis, each video was analysed with Lince observation software by four participants. A Nominal Group Technique generated input for the qualitative analysis and the two principal investigators conducted a post-hoc analysis. A total of 87.5% of the 23 videos showed drowning in swimming pools, 50% of the drowned persons were male, and 58.3% were children or teenagers. Nineteen persons were rescued before unconsciousness and showed just the beginning of downing behaviour. Another five were rescued after unconsciousness, which allowed the observation of their drowning behaviour from the beginning to the end. Significant differences were found comparing both groups regarding the length of disappearances underwater, number, and length of resurfacing (resp. p = 0.003, 0.016, 0.005) and the interval from the beginning of the incident to the rescue (p = 0.004). All persons drowned within 2 min. The qualitative analysis showed previously suggested behaviour patterns (immediate disappearance n = 5, distress n = 6, instinctive drowning response n = 6, climbing ladder motion n = 3) but also a striking new pattern (backward water milling n = 19). This study confirms previous assumptions of drowning behaviour and provides novel evidence-based information about the large variety of visible behaviours of drowning persons. New behaviours, which mainly include high-frequency resurfacing during a struggle for less than 2 min and backward water milling, have been recognised in this study.
Les sports d’hiver permettent une dynamisation économique prépondérante pour de nombreuses régions montagnardes. Cette activité touristique est cependant indissociable des risques corporels qu’elle génère. C’est de ces dangers, qui sont pour l’essentiel subis par les clients des stations, ainsi que de leur prise en charge que traite cet ouvrage.
En la matière, les choses semblent pourtant aller de soi. Lorsqu’on interroge des experts sur les raisons pour lesquelles des accidents surviennent en station, les explications sont données sans délai et avec les plus grandes certitudes : imprudence des pratiquants, rigueur de l’environnement, influence des médias… A quoi bon dès lors chercher à en savoir plus ? Par ailleurs, il peut paraître surprenant de s’intéresser aux actions de prévention des risques et au fonctionnement des secours en montagne. Le droit ne définit-il pas déjà très clairement les responsabilités de chacun ? Les médias ne soulignent-ils pas régulièrement l’expertise des techniciens et l’héroïque dévouement des secouristes ?
La volonté de l’auteur est précisément d’aller au-delà de ce type de discours. Un certain nombre de questions, rarement envisagées à l’heure actuelle, se posent en effet : le nombre de sinistres officiellement mis en avant reflète-t-il la réalité ? Les facteurs de risque sont-ils avant tout le fait des pratiquants et de l’environnement, comme on tend généralement à le souligner ? Les dysfonctionnements, inévitables au sein de toute organisation, épargnent-ils par miracle les professionnels de la sécurité et du secours en montagne ? Les aspects sécuritaires constituent-ils réellement la priorité absolue des décisions prises par les gestionnaires des stations ?
Autant de réflexions auxquelles l’auteur tente d’apporter des éléments de réponse en privilégiant une approche pluridisciplinaire qui fait une large place à l’ingénierie de sécurité, aux sciences sociales et aux aspects politiques de la gestion des risques.
Lifeguard training texts suggest that a lifeguard should continually scan their zone of coverage, carefully examining patrons whose behavior is consistent with drowning or distress. The current study examined whether lifeguard performance is consistent with these specifications and whether these behaviors have enough visual interest to attract the gaze of non-lifeguards looking for drowning behaviors (“trained”) or those who were given no specified target (“naïve”). Participants viewed video clips of natural swimming taken from three aquatic locations while an eye-tracker recorded their eye position. Lifeguard performance was to some extent consistent with the specifications above, although on many measures it was not statistically better than briefly-trained participants. Implications for future research and training are considered. Can be downloaded from: http://scholarworks.bgsu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1181&context=ijare
Evoking a corporation while tackling swimming instructor as a profession seems to be a commonplace. However, this qualification refers to a quite concrete experiment for some of the municipal elected representatives, territorial executives or managers in charge of conceiving and organizing the public utility in the swimming facilities. The defence of professional interests can indeed oppose to the implementation of an educational, sports and playful policy around swimming activities. This paper proposes a sociological analysis of the swimming instructors’ professional stakes through a particularly revealing and dynamic framework : the delegation of public utility. A qualitative investigation carried out within a company specialized in delegated management, based on semi-conductive interviews, made it possible to grasp power struggles and principles of justice entailing criticisms and conflicts at work. Such explanatory factors as the employment market dynamics, organisational resources, the delegation contract, and the status of the public utility agents led us to identify controversies and conflicts around the following aspects: payment, working conditions, authority, and professional career.
Nuclear power production in France, as the domain of one national utility and one reactor builder, has a standardized profile of technical installations, safety procedures, and personnel qualifications. Despite this relative homogeneity, discrepancies are observed from one production unit to another, notably in the area of worker-safety performance. There is a strong implication for risk analysis: varying performance cannot be attributed solely to the technical dimensions of equipment, procedures, and human skills. The authors retain as a working hypothesis that safety performance is an outcome of interactions between technical and organizational factors. Traditional risk analysis appears to be underequipped to represent such interactions. The notion of decentralized risk analysis (DRA) is introduced as a means of achieving this goal. A program of applied research carried out in a NPP facility is presented. It aims at increasing, across plant work structure, knowledge and control of these interactions specific to the given context. Systematic measurements and feedback of social representations are performed, using a three-dimensional factor space of individual and organizational values. Direct involvement of the total plant population, transfer of analytic tools, methodological continuity, interactive elaboration of data, coordination of different levels of findings with operations, follow-up and feedback of measured change, are the main features of this DRA process. In the case cited, improvement observed in safety performance parallels changes in measured social representations. The value of DRA for articulating technical and organizational dimensions of risk, and for integrating information into decision-making, is argued.
Véritable outil de compréhension des causes et des conséquences d'événements dommageables voire catastrophiques, les modèles d'accident ont pris une place essentielle au cœur des démarches d'enquêtes-accident et/ou d'évaluations des risques au sein des systèmes socio-techniques. Leur efficacité n'est plus à prouver et nombreuses sont les organisations les utilisant aux fins de répondre à un besoin de sécurité et à des exigences de performances et de progrès. De nombreux modèles d'accident ont donc été développés. Fondés originellement sur le principe de représentations d'une chaîne d'événements relier par des relations de causes à effets, les modèles contemporains s'appuient désormais, pour une minorité encore, sur la théorie des systèmes et la théorie du contrôle, favorisant ainsi une analyse systémique et une vision holistique des accidents et des catastrophes. Parmi les démarches de modélisation les plus récentes et abouties, le modèle d'accident systémique appelé STAMP (System-Theoretic Accident Modeling and Processes), développé au sein du Massachusetts Institute of Technology, et se fondant sur les concepts de « contrainte », de « structure » et de « modèle de processus » a été retenu dans le cadre de cette thèse. Ce modèle pose comme hypothèse que les accidents résultent d'un contrôle inefficace et inadéquate de la structure d'un système socio-technique le conduisant et le condamnant ainsi à migrer d'un état « sûr » vers un état accidentel. La thèse se fixe trois objectifs. Le premier vise à s'approprier les fondements épistémologiques, théoriques et méthodologiques sous jacents au modèle STAMP. Le deuxième consiste en la mise en œuvre effective du modèle dans le cadre de l'évaluation des risques d'un procédé industriel innovant de dépollution de sédiments contaminés. Le troisième ambitionne à apprécier les apports et les limites du modèle et de proposer au regard des limites repérées des propositions d'amélioration tant au plan théorique que méthodologique.
This paper seeks to establish a framework for comparing and understanding variation in state risk regulation regimes that moves forward from overgeneralised discussions of the nature of 'risk society' or the 'regulatory state' and micro-level debates over policy-settings for particular risks. Conceiving of risk regulation regimes as bundles of 'director', 'detector', and 'effector' activities by state and other institutions, the paper compares current UK risk regulation regimes for domestic radon, dangerous dogs and pesticide contamination of food and water. The paper describes the different forms of, and varying stresses on, director, detector and effector activities across the three cases. It concludes by reflecting on the value of an RRR approach in analysing the state's approach to risk management. In particular, it takes a conventional 'market-failure' approach as a 'null hypothesis' and discusses how far that approach explains variation in RRR profiles among the three cases, and how much remains to be explained by other approaches.
A new theory of search and visual attention is presented. Results support neither a distinction between serial and parallel search nor between search for features and conjunctions. For all search materials, instead, difficulty increases with increased similarity of targets to nontargets and decreased similarity between nontargets, producing a continuum of search efficiency. A parallel stage of perceptual grouping and description is followed by competitive interaction between inputs, guiding selective access to awareness and action. An input gains weight to the extent that it matches an internal description of that information needed in current behavior (hence the effect of target-nontarget similarity). Perceptual grouping encourages input weights to change together (allowing "spreading suppression" of similar nontargets). The theory accounts for harmful effects of nontargets resembling any possible target, the importance of local nontarget grouping, and many other findings.
Anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) injuries are a growing cause of concern, as these injuries can have serious consequences for the athlete with a greatly increased risk of early osteoarthrosis. Using specific training programmes, it may be possible to reduce the incidence of knee and ankle injuries. However, it is not known which programme components are the key to preventing knee and ankle injuries or how the exercises work to reduce injury risk. Our ability to design specific prevention programmes, whether through training or other preventive measures, is currently limited by an incomplete understanding of the causes of injuries. A multifactorial approach should be used to account for all the factors involved-that is, the internal and external risk factors as well as the inciting event (the injury mechanism). Although such models have been presented previously, we emphasise the need to use a comprehensive model, which accounts for the events leading to the injury situation (playing situation, player and opponent behaviour), as well as to include a description of whole body and joint biomechanics at the time of injury.
The prevention of sports accidents must rely on a detailed knowledge of accident circumstances and risk factors. Today, very few studies have investigated in depth non-fatal drowning incidents that have occurred in public swimming pools (PSP). Learning from incidents seems likely to advance the knowledge of accident scenarios. This research study aimed to capture minor incidents that might identify safety lessons and preventive measures. Incidents of minor and major aquatic events were collected from four PSPs that had hosted 700,000 bathers per year. About 800 incidents and 300 aquatic rescues performed by lifeguards were recorded within a time frame of two and one-half years. The analysis of results offered insights both in terms of managing risk and preventing drownings. Drowning risk management could directly benefit from the results of this study. Methodological recommendations also provided suggestions to ensure the proper collection of non-fatal drowning
incidents in PSPs.
Accidents are notoriously frequent in mountain sports, but thorough understanding of the mechanisms of accidentality remains limited by the fragmentation of sources and by mostly heterogeneous methodologies. Nonetheless, the effectiveness of prevention must rely on detailed knowledge of typical circumstances and scenarios. Rooted in the statement that an accident is never induced by a single cause but rather by a dynamic combination of factors, this paper explores the opportunities offered by a systemic analysis of experience feedbacks on accidents and close calls. The study identifies risk factors for several hundred mountaineering accident and near miss reports. In order to enhance the benefit of these descriptions and to show the interaction of a broad variety of contributing factors, it introduces graphic models. This is not an attempt to compress the unique richness of each story, but rather to create a tree structure using the concatenation of multiple testimonials, thus enabling researchers to build general lessons out of individual cases.
To prevent drowning incidents in French public swimming pools (PSP), bathing must be constantly supervised by qualified lifeguards. However, fatal drownings regularly occurs in supervised aquatic facilities, calling into question the efficacy of the supervision chain. The aim of this research is to fully assess the periods during which supervision is not carried out, or carried out in an inadequate manner. The observations made in 108 French PSP show that constant supervision, as stipulated by regulations, represents only half of the time. Over a total observation time of 54 hours, 147 periods during which the supervision system was degraded for 3 min or more were noticed. In the worst-case scenario, this possesses a significant problem in terms of survival probability without sequelae.
A momentary lapse in supervision can be costly when it comes to lifeguarding. Drowning is quick and quiet and can happen in a matter of seconds so distractions can be deadly. Lifeguards are trained to watch the water and avoid distractions. The biggest distraction causing lapses in supervision is often in their heads. Lifeguards might be looking at patrons in the water, with rescue tube in hands, but not really seeing the patrons in the water due to internal noise. Internal noise is a huge distraction because it is difficult for lifeguards to recognize when they are distracted by internal noise, usually impossible for others to see and a challenge to manage. We define internal noise as thoughts and emotions that distract an individual from a task. This paper presents results from our international survey with 839 lifeguard participants, uncovering the types and frequencies of internal noise that distract lifeguards from their lifesaving job.
Traditional hazard analysis techniques are grounded in reliability theory and analyze the human controller-if at all-in terms of estimated or calculated probabilities of failure. Characterizing sub-optimal human performance as "human error" offers limited explanation for accidents and is inadequate in improving the safety of human control in complex, automated systems such as today's aerospace systems. In an alternate approach founded on systems and control theory, Systems-Theoretic Process Analysis (STPA) is a hazard analysis technique that can be applied in order to derive causal factors related to human controllers within the context of the system and its design. The goal of this thesis was to extend the current human-controller analysis in STPA to benefit the investigation of more structured and detailed causal factors related to the human operator. Leveraging principles from ecological psychology and basic cognitive models, two new causal-factor categories-flawed detection and interpretation of feedback and the inappropriate affordance of action-were added to the human-controller analysis in STPA for a total of five categories. In addition, three of the five human-controller causal-factor categories were explicitly re-framed around those environmental and system properties that affect the safety of a control action-the process states. Using a proposed airspace maneuver known as In-Trail Procedure, a former STPA analysis was extended using this updated human-controller analysis. The updated analysis generated additional causal factors under a new categorical structure and led to new instances of specific unsafe control actions that could occur based on additional human factors considerations. The process, organization, and detail reflected in the resultant causal factors of this new human-controller analysis ultimately enhance STPA's analysis of the human operator and propose a new methodology structured around process states that applies equally as well to an automated controller.
Regarding risks associated with activities of daily living, recreational activities tend to be major sources of domestic risks in France. We focused on fatal drownings in public swimming pools, intending to quantify them. We conducted an exhaustive overview of information sources that counted the number of fatal drownings in French public swimming pools. Our results underscored the fact that in spite of using numerous databases, it was impossible to accurately quantify the total number of fatal drown- ings. Gaps in data collection originated as a result of five main methodological issues that are discussed in detail in this article. Shortcomings regarding fatal drowning data gathering and processing enabled us to provide recommandations to key French stakeholders. In particular, our findings emphasize the critical necessity to establish a permanent national repository and database of fatal drownings in public swim- ming pools by gathering of data at the local level by aquatic and public health staff.
Keywords: public swimming pools, accidents, fatal drownings, water safety, injury prevention, emergency services
Professional identities of the territorial sports agents. Between technical reference and model of manager
This research is dedicated to the study of professional identities of territorial sports agents who have now to consider the changes of territorial public management. Our analysis is based on semi-structured interviews conducted with local actors of sport. The results show that the representations of the agents on their jobs include now the managerial dimension. Far from the image of the simple executive agent, they see themselves now as managers, who manage the structures and staff. The managerisation of their competence is the main characteristic of the professionalization.
The presence of lifeguards on beaches and at pools has the potential to prevent many drowning incidents. This article examines the visual components of the lifeguard's job, discussing some of the major challenges they face during surveillance. These include optical challenges (turbidity and turbulence of the water, light refraction, and glare), scene challenges (elevated set size affecting clutter and perceptual ‘blindnesses’), stimulus challenges (searching for multiple targets that are complex, dynamic, ill-defined, and rare), and attentional challenges, including but not limited to vigilance issues. The differences between basic laboratory research and the lifeguarding task are explored, with recommendations for future study. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
The Challenger disaster cannot be accounted for by reductionist explanations that direct attention only toward individual actors, nor by theories that focus solely on communication failure or the social psychological dynamics of the infamous eve-of-launch teleconference. The cause of the tragedy was rooted in historic organizational and environmental contingencies that preceded the launch decision. By tracing the connection between top policy decisions and decisions by engineers and managers assigned to do risky work, this analysis contradicts conventional understandings about what happened at NASA. As a consequence, this case contains new lessons for both managers and students of organizations.
Nuclear industry often closes itself to research projects of the social sciences and to their realization by means of conventional tools such as questionnaires, interviews and the study of archives. On the basis of the observation covering the work of employees exposed to the risks of radiation, the article shows that an ethnographical procedure, where possible, is not without problems either, this time in terms of interpretation because of the context of uncertainty and risk which weighs on the observer as much as on those observed. The difficulty of observational work in this case, however, is not an absolute hindrance to any kind of knowledge, partly reflecting, as it does, the very difficulty of industrial work which is to be investigated. The participation of the observer in such delicate situations appears, in hindsight, as a kind of initiation into a new way of communicating with colleagues at work, which permits a certain control of the interpretations.
Purpose
This paper seeks to review current approaches to learning from health and safety incidents in the workplace. The aim of the paper is to identify the diversity of approaches and analyse them in terms of learning aspects.
Design/methodology/approach
A literature review was conducted searching for terms incident/accident/near misses/disaster/crisis modified with learning/training and safety. Shortlisted articles were analysed by questioning who is learning, what kind of learning process is undertaken, what type of knowledge is employed and the type of problem that these incidents addressed. Current approaches to learning from incidents were critically analysed and gaps identified.
Findings
Very few papers addressed all the envisaged aspects when developing their learning from incidents approaches. With support from literature, it was concluded that all the four perspectives, namely participants of learning (participation and inclusion), learning process (single loop, double learning), type of incident and its relation to learning (Cynefin complexity framework) and types of knowledge (conceptual, procedural, dispositional and locative) are important when deciding on an appropriate learning from incidents approach.
Research limitations/implications
The literature review focused on journal articles and identified keywords, which might have narrowed the scope. Further research is needed in identifying ways to embed the learning from incidents aspects in the organisation.
Practical implications
The framework developed could be useful by safety planners, safety managers, human resource managers and researchers in the area of organisational learning and safety.
Originality/value
The paper concludes by outlining key questions and proposing a framework that could be useful in systematically analysing and indentifying effective approaches to learning from incidents.
New technology is making fundamental changes in the etiology of accidents and is creating a need for changes in the explanatory mechanisms used. We need better and less subjective understanding of why accidents occur and how to prevent future ones. The most effective models will go beyond assigning blame and instead help engineers to learn as much as possible about all the factors involved, including those related to social and organizational structures. This paper presents a new accident model founded on basic systems theory concepts. The use of such a model provides a theoretical foundation for the introduction of unique new types of accident analysis, hazard analysis, accident prevention strategies including new approaches to designing for safety, risk assessment techniques, and approaches to designing performance monitoring and safety metrics.
Errors in spotting key targets soar alarmingly if they appear only infrequently during screening. Visual searches can be vitally important: looking for knives in luggage or tumours in mammograms, for instance. These are visual searches for rare targets, and a study comparing performance on high- and low-prevalence versions of an artificial baggage-screening task shows that we are disturbingly bad at it. If observers looking for ‘tools’ among objects drawn from other categories do not find what they are looking for fairly frequently, they often fail to notice it when it does appear. Our society relies on accurate performance in visual screening tasks — for example, to detect knives in luggage or tumours in mammograms. These are visual searches for rare targets. We show here that target rarity leads to disturbingly inaccurate performance in target detection: if observers do not find what they are looking for fairly frequently, they often fail to notice it when it does appear.
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