Visual Inspection Better For Identifying Hazards Than Checklists

Railway maintenance presents many workplace hazards that need to be identified and controlled. Safety tours consisting of checklists are first choice methods for identifying workplace hazards in railway maintenance depots. But despite their ubiquity, the empirical ability of checklists to adequately observe hazards in workplaces has been questioned(1). Furthermore, recent research from DIT has demonstrated that the fundamental human sensory-perceptual and cognitive processes involved in visual search can profoundly affect the number of hazards observed by environmental health and safety (EHS) professionals(2). Simply put, some workplace inspection methods are better than others for observing hazards.