Appalling attitude to risk is a killing habit for farmers
‘There’s enough material there for an entire conference…” That was the quip made by the psychiatrist in Fawlty Towers after he’d been exposed to a catalogue of Basil’s outbursts as the madcap hotel owner attempted, unsuccessfully, to convince his doctor guests that he was perfectly normal.
But I was possibly guilty of some Fawlty-style paranoia myself when I discovered recently that the farming industry has been the subject of a number of studies conducted by industrial psychologists.
However, while most psychological research looks at what makes individuals and sectors of community tick, much of the work on farmers looks at what might stop us ticking, in the form of our appalling attitude towards health and safety.
The annual death and injury figures in UK farming always make grim reading, with agriculture invariably showing the highest per capita death rate of any trade or profession. And it continues to stand a whole order of magnitude beyond other areas where performance used to be poor, such as building and construction where intervention and regulations have seen death and injury rates tumble in recent decades.
This woeful performance is a global issue however – and an estimated 170,000 workplace fatalities occur in farming each year – and that’s discounting the industry’s equally disturbing high rate of suicide. One factor which undoubtedly plays a role in this is the structure of the industry, for it is far harder to police regulations in
a sector when it is made up of many small businesses rather than cracking down hard on a few big companies if they transgress.
And the fact that smaller businesses also struggle to have sufficient staff or time to keep on top of health and safety advice and initiatives is another factor.
But there is simply no getting away from the reality that mindset also has a lot to do with the general approach towards risk in farming circles – with one Health and Safety Executive boss saying farming has “a can-do attitude which borders on recklessness”.
This is where the psychologists have been poking about. Researchers found that our overall approach to risk not only affects our behaviour but also has a big influence on the success of any interventions, technologies or practices introduced with the hope of making things safer.
Perhaps unsurprisingly they concluded that while farmers often recognise that there are inherent danger sin what they are doing, they don’t always put their own safety at the top of the list when carrying out a task with recognised risks.
And while it might shock the psychologists, it probably wouldn’t have surprised people in the industry that the potential expense of any repair bills or the possibility of operational costs and time delays often appear to be
put ahead of thoughts of personal injury.
The usability of safety devices was another factor which the researchers highlighted – and I think that they were a little stunned by the ingenuity and effort which had sometimes been put into disabling or bypassing automatic safety devices if they slowed operations down.
Getting technical, the psychologists believe that the framework of symbolic interactionism argues that people create a senseof-self as a way of adjusting and adapting to their environment.
And it appears that amongst farmers a belief in the ability to persevere allows us to succeed, despite the considerable stresses and challenges which each day brings.
But researchers also concluded that this identity can, at times, be maladaptive when it is applied to safety decisions and hazard exposures – basically suggesting that we often take this approach too far.
And last week saw the release of a farm operations checklist – similar to those used in other high risk industries – aimed at formalising our thought processes to include safety.
While the research and the checklist won’t yet be enough to halt our reckless behaviour, at least it looks like the conference has begun…