Organisational safety management

The polarised safe/unsafe of the legislative lexicon has unsurprisingly become embedded in organisational safety management practices and safety management systems. Binary evaluations of safety are therefore also found at the heart of various safety management activities, such as risk assessments and site inspections, and so have considerable influence on the construction of safety in practice. 

Many large contractors have distilled their site rules into professionally printed booklets to be distributed on induction, supported by posters to be put up around site. These documentary artefacts of safety are produced within a corporate rather than a site context, and are often positioned as a part of wider organisational safety management systems and safety management programmes. Such site safety guides often present the rules through the dichotomy of ... 

It is the duty of the company to prepare a Major Accident Prevention Policy (MAPP). This will set out the policies for ensuring the safe operation of the plant and the protection of employees and the environment. It will include details of the safety management organisation that will implement the policy. 

Systemic safety management especially prominent after a major organisational disaster, which forces the organisation to take a fundamental look at its entire safety philosophy the appropriate view of human error is the system-induced error concept, which says that many human errors can be... 

In the previous chapters the purposes of near miss reporting have been outlined and a framework of designing such a safety management tool has been presented. The importance of human behaviour as a dominant factor in incident sequences was stressed by developing a system failure classification scheme largely based on a theoretical model of operator behaviour. Also an overview was given of the organisational factors necessary for a successful implementation of a NMMS. 

If an organisation for one or more of the above reasons decides to introduce or improve a near miss reporting system it will face two types of problems- Firstly, how to (re)design such a reporting system to become an effective and efficient safety management tool, and secondly, how to introduce and maintain it, with an emphasis on user acceptance and system support. 

The most important aspect of laboratory design is safety and this should be of paramount importance. Safety in the laboratory is discussed by Darlow and laboratory organisation and management by Duguid. ... 

Organisations still frequently rely on retrospective techniques such as incident reporting and complaints to drive safety management [21] and healthcare has been slow and sporadic in adopting predictive safety assessment techniques to detect medical error [22]. Twenty two percent of people in the UK believe, when asked, that they have been the victim of medical error [23]. Nevertheless continually striving to protect patients at vulnerable points in their lives is stiU clearly the right thing to do and a move from reactive to proactive risk reduction wiU surely pay dividends in the future. 

In some cases, especially where an organisation is managing a small and single product, it may be more efficient to set out the entire CRM process within the safety case itself rather than maintain this information separately. This has the advantage that the safety case becomes a self-contained justification without requiring the reader to consult extraneous material. 

It can be suggested that a consequence of this focus on Brand Zero has produced a depersonalisation of health and safety management. Within a project or organisational context, one individual alone is not able to prevent all accidents it requires shared practice if only because of the logistical and physical demands of the site. Yet under Brand Zero, this shared focus can be easily affected by others, and so responsibility for success resides within the shared workplace, which in turn can lead to individual disassociation with health and safety management at a personal level. Just one incident can therefore ruin the figures and potentially disenchant those who should still be focused on safety management in practice. 

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