Prevention Is Not Enough

Presented by Vallorie Hodges and Fiona McCarthy

What’s covered?

A strong prevention bias in safety thinking doesn’t offer a robust understanding of the complexity of high consequence events. Despite the best risk assessments, procedures, and people, we simply cannot prevent all incidents. We must instead balance prevention efforts with capacity to respond and recover when things go badly. But how do we operationalise this in our organisations?

This session offers a model and the backstory of how we are using it as a simple visual framework to stimulate dialogue and promote learning, shared understanding, and safety differently language. The model is an adaptation of the bowtie… as a propeller. It includes preventive, operational and recovery elements placed in a dynamic mode, represented by turning blades – within a margin of manoeuvre sphere.

We use the model to highlight how prevention efforts deter threats, and to show how the capacity to respond to events may reduce the impact of events. But the real leverage comes when we conceptually shift from bowtie to propeller – the process becomes dynamic, demonstrating how learning creates a feedback loop to improve the entire system- including preventive, operational and response/recovery components.

Watch The Video

About Presenter

About Fiona McCarthy

Fiona McCarthy is a CoHP with AIHS and a full member of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society of Australia. Fiona is an Occupational Therapist and holds masters degrees in Ergonomics Safety and Health and Bioethics.

Her safety career spans Federal Government agencies, Higher Education sector and has consulted with a broad range of industries in her own business.

Fiona is committed to collaboration referenced to the evidence base and has seen the results utilising leading contemporary approaches.

About Vallorie Hodges

Vallorie is the University Dive Officer and Safety & Wellbeing Advisor at the University of Tasmania, Australia. She has an extensive background in safety, diving instruction, and scientific diving with expertise in risk management, learning reviews/investigations, functional (fitness) testing, safety culture, and diving with captive sharks.

Her experiences span careers in law enforcement, journalism, search and rescue, occupational diving, and safety and wellbeing. Ms Hodges was inducted into the Women Diver’s Hall of Fame in 2004 and received the 2012 Divers Alert Network Member’s Choice Award for establishing a culture of dive safety within the community. She has served on the boards of the American Academy of Underwater Sciences and the Association of Dive Program Administrators and has authored and presented numerous papers and publications. Ms Hodges lives in Mountain River Tasmania and is an avid musician.