Risk Assessment: Tools, Techniques, and Their Applications

Chapter 6

Preliminary Hazards Analysis

According to the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC), there are over 21,000 deaths and approximately 28 million injuries associated with the 15,000 products under the commission's jurisdiction (1). The death of any child is an almost unbearable event for a family, and an infant death is even more so. Infants die each year because of poor product designs. Deaths associated with the designs of cribs are one of the issues the CPSC deals with. One of the most common causes of infant death due to crib design is when the infant gets his or her head through the bars of the crib and then becomes strangled when they cannot remove their head. This can happen one of two ways: (i) an infant's head is smaller than the opening or (ii) an infant's skull is still soft and can deform, which allows the head to pass through the bars. Imagine the shock and horror of a young parent when they discover that the infant they love has died because its head passed through the bars of the crib and was subsequently suffocated.

Manufacturers do not deliberately produce products that can hurt children. However, when a product designer does not consider all the possible consequences of their design, fatal accidents will happen.

Preliminary hazard analysis (PHA) will be the focus of this chapter. Several applications of this tool will be explored. The partial analysis of a piece of infant furniture will be one example.