PROCEEDINGS of theHUMAN FACTORS AND ERGONOMICS SOCIETY 45th ANNUAL MEETING- 2001 IMPROVING INCIDENT REPORTS USING A SCHEMATIC RECALL AID: THE CRITICAL EVENT REPORTING TOOL (CERT)

Incident reports are intended to help identify problems in safety critical systems and aid in preventing subsequent accidents, thus improving safety. Unfortunately, incident-reporting forms are generally unstructured, providing little guidance to the reporter on how to describe the critical events of an incident. As a result, most reports contain information on what happened, as opposed to why an incident happened, and hence make the identification of intervention and prevention strategies onerous. The purpose of the present study was to help remedy this situation by developing and testing a tool, coined the Critical Event Recall Tool (CERT) for improving the quality of information contained in narrative reports of incidents. Results of this study indicate that CERT improved the analytical content of general aviation pilots ' reports of a critical incident that occurred during a simulated cross-country flight and that pilots who used CERT generally felt that the tool was easy to use and understand. INTRODUCTION an essay. In particular, CERT was designed to encourage users to think of why an incident happened and the factors that Incident reports aid in identifying problems within a affected their actions during an incident, in addition to system before accidents occur. As noted by Heinrich (1959), describing the equally important what events that occurred incidents are precursors to accidents, consisting in orders of during an incident