ABSTRACT
Note to the reader: The term human error is used throughout this chapter as a convenient label for something done or not done by the human operator, which is unintended by the operational system concept and can lead to increased safety risk. In Human reliability assessment (HRA), there is no connotation of blame or an action being wrong in a moral or pejorative sense. All actions are the product of the system via its design, environment, culture, training and other factors. HRA presumes that an error could happen to any of the operators, therefore blame is an inappropriate and misleading concept. This will be returned to later when discussing safety and Just Culture. HRA never ascribes blame to a particular person, since by denition another person would likely have had the same error. HRA uses the term because it is convenient, and even those who write with a focus on resilience and who dislike the very term human error often end up using it in their books, because it is difcult to nd a workable substitute when discussing human performance within a risk management process.
