Define Priorities

No company today has the luxury of unlimited resources to implement PSM programs and few have the capacity to tackle everything at once. Clearly, you will need to set priorities for each of the actions required by the system you design to ensure orderly and rational implementation. 

Having defined your company s PSM goals (Chapter 3) and assessed your current status (Chapter 4), you should be well equipped to establish workable criteria for setting priorities. 

Before selecting which of these (or other) criteria make sense for your company s situation, it s useful to consider some of the reasons why each may be important. 

Corporate policies gooeming safety management must be reflected in a company s PSM program. 

In setting priorities for action, you must aiso consider avaiiabie resources. You may identify an action step that produces the single largest improvement in process safety, and discover that it requires all of your available resources. Alternatively, you may be able to spread your efforts among a number of lower priority actions that together have a greater impact on overall safety performance. 

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The approach taken to defining priorities in your initial implementation (see Chapter 5) can be applied internationally as well. Priorities will be driven by the risks and by the existing systems that are already in place to help manage those risks. 

Defining priorities helps determine the scope of the plan. Remember that you may not be able to achieve total integration as a first step. Total integration may be achieved over an extended period and with a series of individual projects. You must design your plan so that subsequent integration projects can dovetail with yours. 

Kamangar, F., Dores, G. M., and Anderson, W. F. (2006). Patterns of cancer incidence, mortality, and prevalence across five continents Defining priorities to reduce cancer disparities in different geographic regions of the world. /. Clin. Oncol. 24, 2137-2150. 

The generalist and the specialist models have been successful in many hospitals, provided that there has been a systematic approach to the development, implementation, and evaluation of the clinical services provided. There must be a clearly articulated philosophy of practice that describes why a pharmacist provides clinical services and a clear definition of the work to be done. We must remember that the patient is central to any endeavor. If the clinical service is defined in terms of patient need, it becomes easier to define priorities, resource requirements, and optimal outcomes. The primary focus of a clinical service should be the patient and not a medical service or a drug category. Full integration of clinical practice into drug distribution services optimizes the chances for success. 

Based in France and sometimes referred to as the Norme Franchise, AFNOR covers a wide range of services and goods with 17 major standardization programmes (GPNs). Each programme is piloted by a strategic orientation committee (COS) that is responsible for defining priorities, activities and cooperation within that area. 

A precursor to a toxicity index is the common use of tests to rank environmental samples or hazardous sites according to the severity of the toxic responses. Toxicity ranking defines priority for action on the most toxic effluents or contaminated sites. Ranking the samples can become complicated if toxicity has been measured with several tests that produced variations in rank. Joining the responses into a toxicity index would express potential hazard in a single number. 

TABLE 3. Results of Assessment Performed Among Epidemiologists and Microbiologists Targeted to Define Priorities for Disease Surveillance... 

In conclusion, PAH and soil evolution indexes are simple and rapid tools for the characterisation of PAH-contaminated soils in terms of level and repartition of pollution and for the prediction of their potential biotreatability. From an environmental point of view, they permit pointing out sensitive zones and defining priorities in terms of decontamination. 

The workshop was structured around a series of plenary and keynote presentations illuminating the needs and issues of each sector. These, in turn, fueled discussion in breakout sessions focused on defining priorities and linkages. A key outcome of this process was the identification of six critical overarching themes that could serve as a unifying framework in the formulation of strategy... 

As cost reduction and durability improvement will not automatically go hand in hand, it is important to define priorities. For the acceptance of a new technology, robustness and performance are cmcial, more than costs. With many alternative drive trains and energy carriers foreseen to be introduced in the coming decade, failures on robustness and performance will not be tolerated by consumers. If market stimulation packages by govermnents to stimulate the sales of clean vehicles are put in place, the last part of the cost reduction can be postponed to next generation vehicles, when the technology already has been adopted. In any case, the options for further cost reduction should be present. 

Numerous publications in fuel cell research dwell on the key issues that are related to Pt utilization in PEFCs. A brief survey of representative studies that focus on Pt utilization and effectiveness factors can be found in [56]. In the past, ambiguous definitions of catalyst utilization have been exploited and rather contradictory values have been reported. This could lead to a wrongful assessment as to how much the performance of fuel cells could be improved by advanced structural design of catalyst layers. As a matter of fact, the accurate distinction and determination of catalyst utilization and effectiveness factors has a major impact on defining priorities in catalyst layer research. 

Fisher, M.M. and Cundiff, B.T., APC Vision and Technology Roadmap for the Automotive Market—Defining Priority Research for Plastics in 21st Century Vehicles, SAE Technical Paper No. 2002-01-1890, SAE International, Warrendale, PA, 2002. 

A great amount of organizational hurrying is the result of management s failure to clearly define priorities. This is not an argument that work should be carried out at a leisurely pace but rather that one task should be... 

Fixed Priority preemptive scheduling Every OBSW task is created with the mode flags RTEMS PREEMPT and RTEMS NO TIMESLICE (and a 0 interrupt level), and with a statically defined priority (EIEO Within Priorities). There are no calls to rtems task mode or rtems task set priority (No Dynamic Priorities). 

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