Improving Incident Reports Using a Schematic Recall Aid: The Critical Event Reporting Tool (CERT)

Abstract

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.