evitarability

Evitarability is a proposed property of a process, event, or outcome that denotes the extent to which it can be prevented or avoided. In risk assessment and safety engineering, it is used to categorize harms or incidents by their preventability, distinguishing those that are avoidable given current knowledge, resources, and constraints from those that are not. The concept serves as a heuristic for prioritizing interventions and allocating resources.

Etymology and usage: the term combines evitar (to avoid) with the English suffix -ability, reflecting its meaning as the capacity for avoidance. It is not widely standardized in scholarly literature and is often treated as a conceptual tool rather than a formal metric. As a result, definitions and applications can vary across disciplines.

Measurement and interpretation: there is no universally accepted scale for evitarability. Researchers may approximate it with indicators such as the preventable fraction of events, the feasibility and cost of interventions, or residual risk after applying known controls. The concept is dynamic: advances in technology, policy, or behavior can increase a previously unavoidable outcome’s evitarability.

Applications: in public health, evitarability helps prioritize interventions (for example, vaccination or sanitation can decrease the evitarable share of disease); in workplace safety, training and engineering controls shift incidents toward higher evitarability. It also informs cost-benefit analysis by focusing on events with high evitarability at acceptable costs.

Limitations and critique: avoidability judgments involve value judgments about acceptable risk and feasibility; the lack of standard definitions can hamper comparability across studies; the term may be used loosely to promote policies without clear criteria.

See also: preventable harm, avoidability, risk assessment, safety engineering.