The need to create and maintain a good safety culture has been recently acknowledged as a top priority by a number of high hazard, high reliability industries. In this context, safety culture can be described as the human and organizational factors which impact upon safety. This is the focus of this text which is divided into three phases and reported in six chapters.
This open access book addresses several questions regarding the implementation of human and organisational factors (HOF) so that recent improvements in industrial safety can be built upon. It addresses sources of frustration in senior management with high expectations of operational recommendations and disquiet on the part of HOF specialists struggling to have an impact on high-level decision making. The brief explores these issues with an emphasis on examples and lessons learned based on the experience of its authors, who come from different academic disciplines and various industrial sectors such as oil and gas, energy and transportation. It then offers some ways forward for a better consideration of HOF in hazardous companies with a view of promoting safety and facing challenges in a rapidly changing world.
This document outlines the results from Volume 1 of the Joint Industry/Health and Safety Executive (HSE) funded report RR 059/2002, which has investigated the feasibility of benchmarking human and organizational factors in offshore safety. Volumes 2 and 3 describe the results of a study on human factors causes in offshore accidents and the application of Crew Resource Management training in offshore crews, respectively. Building on an informal benchmarking exercise carried out during the project Human and organizational factors in offshore safety (OTH 97 543).
Since the 2010 Deepwater Horizon blowout and oil spill, efforts to improve safety in the offshore oil industry have resulted in the adoption of new technological controls, increased promotion of safety culture, and the adoption of new data collection systems to improve both safety and performance. As an essential element of a positive safety culture, operators and regulators are increasingly integrating strategies that empower workers to participate in process safety decisions that reduce hazards and improve safety. While the human factors of personal safety have been widely studied and widely adopted in many high-risk industries, process safety â€" the application of engineering, design, and operative practices to address major hazard concerns â€" is less well understood from a human factors perspective, particularly in the offshore oil industry. The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine organized a workshop in January 2018 to explore best practices and lessons learned from other high-risk, high-reliability industries for the benefit of the research community and of citizens, industry practitioners, decision makers, and officials addressing safety in the offshore oil industry. This publication summarizes the presentations and discussions from the workshop.
Workplace accidents and errors cost organizations hundreds of billions of dollars each year, and the injured workers and their families endure considerable financial and emotional suffering. It's obvious that increasing employee health and safety pays. The accumulating evidence shows that investing in occupational health and safety results in improved financial and social responsibility performance. There are extensive country differences and wide occupational differences in the incidence of accidents and errors. The International Labour Organization (ILO) estimates that every year there are 2.2 million fatal and 270 million non-fatal accidents or occupational diseases worldwide. Occupational Health and Safety looks at the research into what causes accidents and errors in the workplace. In line with other titles in the series, Occupational Health and Safety emphasizes the psychological and behavioral aspects of risk in organizations. It highlights how organizations differ in their health and safety performance, with case studies throughout and best practices. Key elements focus on: employee selection and training, fostering employee understanding, participation and engagement in health and safety matters, developing a health and safety culture at organizational and group/work unit levels, communicating and reinforcing safe workplace practices and bench-marking one's organization against the industry leaders. The contributors to this volume come from various countries, reflecting unique interest and knowledge in particular areas.
Safety Management and Human Factors Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Applied Human Factors and Ergonomics (AHFE 2022), July 24–28, 2022, New York, USA
