Cultural aspects of an incident reporting and investigation system within a licensed site in the UK nuclear industry

A problem was identified with an increase in incidents over a twelve month period and as part of the solution the company wanted to identify any cultural problems with the incident reporting and investigation process. A data collection exercise was undertaken using a semi-structured data set covering all the main aspects of the incident reporting and investigation process. The data collection exercise was undertaken on a one to one basis covering the different strata across the site. These strata included senior managers, project managers, safety representatives, supervisors, operators, incident interviewees and incident investigators. The interviews were recorded, transcripts made which were coded using Nivio. Historical data and accident statistics were analysed. Triangulation of data was possible for three issues identified. Firstly the level of supervision appears poor. This finding was confirmed from a previous safety climate survey and also from historical reports. The second issue was that incidents were caused by people helping. This data originated from the interviews and was supported in the root cause analysis incident data and the historical documentation. A third subject was that of contractors culture. This was initially identified from the transcripts from the interviews. A safety climate survey had identified that contractors on the UKAEA site had a poorer culture and also some of the contractor’s operators were unwilling to be open during data collection.