Report identifies early warning for plant safety breakdown 15 February 2011

Practical early warning signals that could help industry anticipate failures in workplace safety have been identified in a report released by the Energy Institute, Lloyd's Register and the HSE.

Richard Sadler, chief executive of Lloyd's Register, believes the report will help plant managers to measure the health of their safety regimes, potentially opening the way to important advances in workplace safety, environmental stewardship and operational efficiency.

"This report is significant, in that it proposes a set of metrics and provides information that will allow the process industry to accurately measure the human factors that affect the safety performance of the organisation, particularly concerning how the workforce interact with high-risk assets," states Sadler.

"What recent investigations of industrial incidents continue to show is that strategies for asset safety are not enough," he explains. "Effective risk management must include the human part of the interaction between people, plant and process – and that is why we continue to invest heavily in this particular area."

Meanwhile, Rob Miles, head of human and organisational factors, Offshore Division, at HSE, makes the point that while there have been big improvements in asset quality and management systems over the past decade, human factors remain the "final frontier".

"During our inspections and investigations, we are placing increasing emphasis on the role of safety-leaders," says Miles.

"A key element of this is what information reaches those in leadership roles, how they understand that information and what actions they then take. We see this report as providing the framework for how such information is gathered and used, particularly on the challenging human-factors issues," he advises.

While its methodologies for measuring the factors that affect performance of the workforce are likely to have clear benefits for the energy industry, the report's authors believe it also has relevance for plants operating high-risk assets in the chemicals, power, nuclear, rail and marine sectors.

"Major accident hazard site operators who are seeking to demonstrate continuous improvement in the management of the human element of risk should read this research report," warns Graham Reeves, chairman of the EI's Human and Organisational Factors Committee.

"It introduces the latest thinking on performance measurement and proposes leading and lagging indicators for the HSE human factors key topics. Simple, concise information is provided that stresses workforce involvement, combined with a design template to support the design of human factors performance indicators for implementation within a business," he adds.

Brian Tinham

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