Quels modèles pour prévenir les accidents du travail d’aujourd’hui ?

Approximately 70 % of occupational accidents involving lost work time, which occurred in France in 2008, involved bumps, sprains, jams, falls, pain during movement or effort. About 5 % of these accidents were falls from high places and 34 % occurred during manual handling operations. Surprisingly, one of the immediate causes of these injuries was not any disturbance identified as inherently harmful and external to the victim, but rather disturbances associated with the motion of the victim. In addition, these occurrences often concerned a hazard termed "circumstantial" since it was, a priori, compatible with human presence in a familiar situation. Virtually all work activity involves a potential risk of this kind of accident, which is frequently considered commonplace, minor and of little interest in the prevention field, despite the statistics. Issues raised by the prevention of this type of occupational accident, the variety of socio-technical systems, the risks they are required to confront and the multiplicity of objectives in developing a model all justify the current interest in intermediate accident models. We discuss accident model characteristics, which are specifically linked to both the type of accident and model development objective: the model's systemic nature, its level of generality, the type of accident factors involved and the links between them, the difference between the no-accident work situation and the accident situation as reflected by the model, the model's limits and its ability to predict occurrence of similar events. Special attention is given to modeling accidents involving movement disturbance. Differences between these accidents and major accidents are confirmed but, paradoxically, a number of aspects are similar. In particular, the difference between modeled accident and no-accident work situations is comparable for a collision with equipment, for example, and a major accident. The latter is described by Hollnagel (2004) as the product of normal operational variabilities. We subsequently describe the model of accidents involving movement disturbance. This model was developed to transform existing representations of this kind of accident. Our model is systemic, taking into account factors considered "subjective," and using a unique combination of common factors to represent deviation from a no-accident work situation. The concept of "circumstantial hazard" in the model allows us to highlight the impossibility of implementing the safest prevention barriers for this type of accident and the difficulties of a risk assessment. This paper confirms the advantage of modeling and analyzing occupational accidents. Accidents models have become a tool for identifying accident-prone variabilities in work situations. Individuals, groups and organizations can all benefit from knowing these variabilities in order to prevent accidents of a similar type.