Reason wrote books on
human error, In 2003, he was awarded an honorary
DSc by the
University of Aberdeen. He was a Fellow of the
British Academy, the
British Psychological Society, the
Royal Aeronautical Society, and the
Royal College of General Practitioners. He was appointed a
Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the
2003 New Year Honours "for services to Reducing the Risk in Healthcare." In 2011, he was elected an honorary Safety and Reliability Society fellow. Among his many contributions is the introduction of the
Swiss cheese model, a conceptual framework for the description of accidents based on the notion that accidents will happen only if multiple barriers fail, thus creating a path from an initiating cause to the ultimate, unwanted consequences, such as harm to people, assets, the environment, etc. Reason also described the first fully developed theory of a
just culture in his 1997 book,
Managing the Risks of Organizational Accidents. ==Personal life and death==