Safety prioritising

How individuals within an organisation are expected to prioritise safety in then-day to day work as part of a safety culture and how concerns can be raised in a blame-free, non-prejudicial manner. 

Whilst we like to tell people to prioritise safety within their work, if the realities of the work environment do not permit or support this, then it becomes yet more empty safety rhetoric. All the safety propaganda slogans and targets and engagement programmes in the world will not have any effective impact if safety is not actually what is being prioritised on site. 

The findings of our survey demonstrate the conceptual model outUned in the previous section they show that safety climate can be understood in the context of job characteristics, which in turn are the product of organisational dynamics. For example, pharmacies that are considered to prioritise safety are the ones that ensure that pharmacy staff have srrfficient resources to cope with their demands. Hence, a key issue to consider with regard to safety culture improvement is the nature of job roles, tasks, technology and organisational objectives (see also Sujan... 

The end of the cycle is heralded by growing financial investment associated with pressure to prioritise safety policies (these may give rise to direct costs in terms of personnel or resources or indirect costs in terms of reduced activity and inability to... 

Findings from the case study revealed that modelling of operational control processes takes an enormous amount of time, while afterwards many precursors and their accompanying control processes are not that relevant from a safety perspective. From a traditional safety perspective only those processes which are directly related to the highest risks are analysed. This implies that a prioritisation of precursors has to be made before analysing the effectiveness of accompanying control processes. 

For strategic reasons energy safety will be prioritised, and the social situation will be improved. This implies that the gas will be used first of all for power generation and the household sector respectively. 

Substances that provide certain safety or utility functions (permissible uses) Colours in warning signs processing chemicals for pharmaceuticals Permissible uses should not have been prioritised for evaluations or other decision-making, and could even be issued with time-limited exceptions to restriction or authorisation. A company should be able to identify whether specific uses meet these demands prior to registration. 

Risk-Benefit Target-setting schemes for countries to establish levels of safety in national territories that go beyond minimum EU standards Member State permitting option for controlling occupational exposures Prioritisation method for regulatory decision-making... 

Table 2. Prioritisation of Food Safety Measures by EU consumers [2] ...

Since the formation of the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA) there has been an emphasis on a demonstrable process for prioritisation of remediation work on UK decommissioning sites. As part of this process, the HI has now been re-named the Radiological Hazard Potential (RHP) and is one of five metrics which are combined numerically to produce a prioritisation metric, the Safety and Environmental Detriment (SED), see below. This paper relates only to the RHP. It is a quantitative measure of the potential for a material or plant item to cause harm, but does not address the risk of that harm occurring and has universal application irrespective of facility type. 

The Perstorp Group has developed its own SHE management system, based on the Swedish Safety at Work Act, ISO 14001, the EMAS, Responsible Care and the Business Charter for Sustainable Development. Since 1995 it has carried out 40 audits to prioritise actions needed to implement the SHE management system. There is a corporate objective to implement this system in all divisions by 2000. 

The US Department of Veterans Affairs National Center for Patient Safety (NCPS) of the US Department of Veterans Affairs, which developed a new root cause analysis model to be used in the healthcare system consisting of assigning a safety assessment code to prioritise... 

Of course not all users prioritise these characteristics equally. An expert user is more likely to focus on efficiency whilst a beginner will require leamability and memorability. Errors in safety-related HIT systems frequently translate into the propensity to trigger hazards. On this basis, all HIT system designers need to prioritise managing error occurrence as a design objective. 

An iterative, user-centred approach has advantages in many areas of product development but perhaps none more so than in user interface design. Manufacturers should actively plan to work and re-work a user interface many times in the course of a project. Of course the earlier this process begins, the more opportunities there are to tweak the design without compromising project timescales. In the context of a time-bound software development project it may not be realistic to evaluate every screen and function in a system so it makes sense to prioritise those which are used frequently and/or are critical for safety. Even after go-live it is invaluable to solicit feedback from users once they have had the time to use the system in anger and address areas of concern. 

Documenting a clinical risk assessment takes time and effort. But, where a healthcare organisation wishes a fix to be prioritised on the basis of its impact on clinical safety, it seems reasonable for that request to be backed up by an objective analysis. Manufacturers are often more than willing to prioritise serious concerns but support staff who are often non-clinical need the right information to justify escalation. Where the issue is in relation to a user interface component, anonymised screenshots are vital on the basis that a picture paints a thousand words and that safety issues are often very subtle. 

A final, yet fundamental point to be made with regard to safety management systems is that their all-encompassing nature often means that safety can easily become cluttered with inspections, rules, objectives and methods for measurement. Yet when we look beyond their titles, within the Health and Safety Executive s safety management guidance, swift prioritisation is made of the ideas of hazard, harm and risk something that often forms only a part of safety management systems. 

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