Organisations safety-critical

This situation is all in stark contrast to other safety critical industries. For example in aerospace there is a more open and transparent culture of learning which crosses organisational and otherwise commercially competitive boundaries. lu aerospace stakeholders are aware that improvements in safety are for the greata good of the industty and that in the long term a safe product drives revenues for aU players. HIT suppliers have some way to catch up and it is largely the responsibility of their customers to call for the transparency that is required to enable a rigorous and practical assurance process. 

Reason, J.T. (1997) Managing the Risks of Organisational Accidents, Ashgate, Aldershot. Reason, J.T. (2001) Understanding adverse events the human factor. Clinical Risk Management Enhancing Patient Safety, 2nd edn (ed. C. Vincent), BMJ Books, London. RedmiU, R. and Rajan, J. (1997) Human Factors in Safety Critical Systems, Butterworth Heinemann, Oxford. 

An important safety culture element is communi-cation and consultations. Often the OH S knowledge and expertise that a company applies comes from consultants retained (Jarvis etal. 2008). Effective communication mechanisms within the organisation are critical to engage staff in safety activities, to gain cooperation and support, and to maintain positive safety culture. At the same time, clear and constructive safety coimnunication and cooperation with OPs can improve knowledge and understanding that prevents at-risk behaviour as well as enhance safe culture. 

Elina Pietikfiinen works as senior research scientist at the VTT Technical Research Centre in Finland. Her background is in psychology. Her research interests include safety culture evaluation and development, safety management, safety expertise, organisational evaluation and organisational learning. She works in research and development projects in several safety critical industries, such as social and healthcare and the nuclear industry. 

The final case study concerned an organisation that carried out significant procurement of safety critical systems. The procurement typically involved multidisciplinary systems. The client was concerned with what were perceived as escalating costs of safety management. In particular, the client wished to understand whether projects were becoming more risk averse, or whether more funding was required to drive down unacceptable safety risk. 

The Safety-Critical Systems Club exists to raise awareness of safety issues in the field of safety-critical systems and to facilitate the transfer of safety technology from wherever it exists. It is an independent, non-profit organisation that co-operates with all bodies involved with safety-critical systems. 

The Safety-critical Systems Symposium, organised by the Safety-Critical Systems Club, provides a forum for inter-disciplinary technology transfer. Because it does so in a club atmosphere rather than a commercial environment, problems are more readily admitted to and lessons more openly communicated. We thank Joan Atkinson for the logistical organisation that makes this possible. 

This is done within the constraints of the quality policy for the organisation or project. Note that this list is applicable to all product developments or acquisitions and there is no special case for significantly safety-critical systems. 

The management of projects developing safety-critical systems poses particular challenges, as do the delivery of systems safety in IT service organisations, and the preparation of safety cases for systems of systems. These important topics are brought together in the second session of the Symposium. 

This year s authors have, as usual, delivered informative material touching on many topics that are of current concern to the safety-critical systems community, and we are gratefiil to them for their contributions. We also thank our sponsors for their valuable support, and the exhibitors at the Symposium s tools and services fair for their participation. And we thank Joan Atkinson and her team for laying the event s foundation through their exemplary planning and organisation. 

Kurd, Z., Kelly, T. Using Euzzy Self-Organising Maps for Safety Critical Apphcations. Reliability Engineering System Safety 92(11), 1563—1583 (2007)... 

Lifetrack Organisational Modelling for Safety-Critical Decision Support... 

The organisational processes in our framework are represented as sequences of Schuman-Pitt operations. By proving event effectiveness for every Schuman-Pitt operation we result having verifiable organisational Mocesses [Glykas 93a] that are of particular importance in safety critical applications like permit management. The formal representation of these proof obligations as first order predicates is mechanically derivable from the text of the model itself. 

The Ministry of Defence (MoD) already requires that tenderers for safety-critical systems "provide reasonable evidence that there is an awareness of safety throughout their organisation" [7] para 7.3.1. So far as the author is aware, neither the MoD nor other major purchasers define "safety awareness" or what would constitute reasonable or acceptable evidence of that quality. Denis Jackson has suggested what might constitute reasonable evidence [9], and the revision of Def Stan 00-S6 which was due for completion in late 1993 may clarify the MoD requirements. 

It is concluded that safety-critical systems raise many social issues and that responsibility for remedial measures is not obvious. Individual practitioners are exhorted by professional codes of practice etc to behave ethically, but organisations rarely ascribe corporate responsibility for business ethics or address the sort of social issues which are raised in this paper. At higher levels of responsibility and planning, purchasers, trade associations, standards makers, regulatory authorities and Parliament itself are tentative in their leadership on social issues of safety-critical systems this is probably due to sporadic public interest and to ignorance of potential costs and their affordability. 

The objective of the research programme is to provide methods and guide-lines for the development and use of KBS in safety critical and high integrity applications, and is organised in three phases as follows ... 

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