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31 January 2011Risk & Critical Procedures
Are your Safety Critical Procedures being Implemented? How do you Know?
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Risk & Critical Procedures
31 January 2011
Are your Safety Critical Procedures being Implemented? How do you Know?
How do you know if your safety critical procedures are being implemented in practice?
Are you working in an industry which is “safety critical?” By safety critical, I mean an industry where if something were to go wrong, it could impact a large number of people. Examples of safety critical industries include the energy and power industries as well as transport such as railways and air transport. If you are working in one of these industries, the chances are that there are some procedures which it is very important that they are correctly and consistently implemented. But how do you know if safety critical procedures are being implemented properly? This is the question raised recently with the release of the official report into the Montara well blowout in the Timor Sea off northern Australia. The official report reveals that critical procedures were not being followed and that senior managers in the company did not know that this was the case. There was no effective monitoring of the extent to which essential procedures were being followed.
Sadly this is not an isolated case. The evidence from previous enquiries into other major accident events tells a similar story. Dr Tony Barrell, formerly Chief Executive Officer of the UK Health and Safety Executive’s Offshore Safety Division, (the offshore petroleum safety regulator) who led the development of the regulatory response to the 1988 Piper Alpha disaster, in which 167 men died, has observed:
"...there is an awful sameness about these incidents...they are nearly always
characterised by lack of forethought and lack of analysis and nearly always the
problem comes down to poor management..."
Our experience in HHI confirms this analysis. To help make sure you are managing (and monitoring) these critical controls you should be able to answer the following questions:
- Is there an allocated “owner” for all critical procedures? In other words is there someone or a job position with the unambiguous responsibility for keeping the procedure up to date?
- Can the “owner” tell you how well the procedure is working in practice? In other words how “healthy” is the procedure?
- How do they know – what evidence do they have that it is working OK? Have they or someone else checked that it is being applied as intended?
- Is there a system for checking the critical procedure – does someone have the accountability to regularly monitor its implementation?
- If the procedure needs improving – is there a plan to do this?
- And finally, is there adequate workforce involvement in designing and reporting on the health of the safety critical procedures? In other words, do the people who have to implement the procedure have involvement in its design and implementation?
If you can answer positively these questions – well done! If not.....!
Filed Under: Risk Control & Leadership / Tagged with: risk, Risk Control, Disasters, Risk Compliance
