Iran Occupational Health

 Background and aims: Nature of the work in control rooms is such that it can be classified as sophisticated with high-cognitive load jobs and, therefore, the prevention of human error seems to be necessary. A nalysis of cognitive tasks is the first and important step for designing preventive programs. This study was conducted to identify, quantify and compare the cognitive requirements of different occupations in the control rooms of a petrochemical industry.

 Methods: In this cross-sectional and descriptive-analytical study, Cognitive Task Analysis (CTA) and Fleishman Job Analysis Survey (FJAS) methods were used. The samples were 20 expert control room operators from leaders, board operators and site operators with 40.9 ± 6.98 years of old and 17.05 ± 6.25 years of work experience, which voluntary participated in this study. The One-Way ANOVA and Tukey HSD tests were used for Statistical data analysis via SPSS version 17.

 Results: Based on the results of HTA –as the first CTA phase- 8 subtasks in leadership, board operator and site operator tasks were recognized. In addition, 12 cognitive requirements were defined for studied tasks via CTA. The FJAS scores indicated that 70% of recognized requirements in CTA are in moderate to high levels (the FJAS mean score higher than 4) which obligates a relatively high cognitive ability to operators. The Tukey HSD test results revealed no significant difference in cognitive requirements level of leadership and board operator tasks, as well as board operators and site operators. However, it was significantly different between leadership and site operator tasks (P value <0.05).

 Conclusion: This study indicated numerous and relatively, high level cognitive requirements of tasks in petrochemical control rooms, especially, among board operators. Moreover, due to the ability of scaling and analyzing various parameters, FJAS can be considered not only as a complementary but also as an alternative for CTA.