| Defining what is meant by a STS approach to safety |
Identifying the core constructs and elements of STS, and applying this to safety are often difficult |
STS means many things to different people and this can sometimes be confusing, especially for safety practitioners |
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It is difficult to pin down how the various theoretical traditions which make up STS relate to one another |
‘Navigating’ through the vast range of methods is often difficult for non-experts |
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Many of the most established constructs within STS (e.g. optimisation, redundancy) need to be reappraised in the light of more recent theory |
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| The coverage of STS and its application to safety |
Current methods do not address external and environmental aspect of the work domain (e.g. regulatory, economic influences on safety) |
A narrow range of causal factors may be used to explain the nature of accidents and human error |
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The boundaries between system elements are often blurred or insufficiently defined |
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| The usability of current methods |
There is not enough support in current methods to analyse interactions across system levels |
Interventions which are designed on the basis on using a method may be unsuccessful, since safety may involve a number of system levels and the interaction between these |
| Methods reliability and validity |
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Many methods prove to be difficult to use, time consuming and require a lot of training |
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Few methods describe details covering their reliability and validity |
