Using Schematic Aids to Improve Recall in Incident Reporting: The Critical Event Reporting Tool (CERT)

Incident reports are intended to facilitate problem identification and aid in allaying accidents, thus improving safety. Unfortunately, most incident reports are generally unstructured, providing little or no guidance to the reporter. Therefore, most reports contain information only about what happened, as opposed to why an incident happened, making identification of intervention and prevention strategies extremely difficult. This study seeks to help remedy this problem with incident reports by developing and testing a method for improving pilots' reporting of incidents. This method, coined the critical event reporting tool (CERT), is described, and research supporting its potential as an instrument for improving the quality of incident reports is provided.