Safety-critical practices

The third ring from the center of the model addresses what the leader does—his behavior, or practices. The model positions practices next to style. For a leader to become a great safety leader, he must translate his core values, personality, and leadership style into safety-critical practices. 

The great safety leader is tuned in to the behaviors of subordinates and other treatment team members, sets the expectation that safety-critical practices will be followed, monitors safety behaviors regularly, and provides soon, certain, and positive feedback (to be discussed in the next chapter) when the behaviors do occur. Negative feedback also has its place in certain situations. But in the great majority of cases, soon, certain, and positive feedback is a better way to sustain effective behavior. 

An inherently safer system should have inspection and reliability testing of safety critical systems and practices (CCPS, 1993c). 

Inadequate process safety management practices are often cited as the cause of reactive incidents, as discussed in Section 3.0 (Table 4). Incident data underscore the critical importance of successfully implementing the following key elements throughout the life cycle48 of a manufacturing process ... 

Human expertise in complex systems is constantly changing and a New Paradigm for software safety assurance is considered. As the development of Safety Critical Systems is guided by standards, the standards are to be updated3. In what follows we present a general view of how the development of safe software systems is currently practiced and show two specific solutions aimed at efficient support of the efforts. Responsibility of organizations, processes and culture, not just efforts of specific members of the organizations, is emphasized. 

Practical Information on Aging of Pressure Vessels, Tanks, Piping, and Safety Critical Instruments... 

Practical Information on Safety, Critical Instruments, Pressure Vessels, Tanks, and Piping... 

These aim at illustrating/conTuming the content covered in the chapter, hi the process, students will certainly develop manipulative skills and learn about safety procedures, practical equipment and procedures. However, there is no systematic and deliberate attempt at helping them develop skills and abihties needed to undertake scientific enquiry to critically analyse a situation, solve a problem and make decisions. 

The human factors literature is rich in task analysis techniques for situations and jobs requiring rule-based behavior (e.g., Kirwan and Ainsworth 1992). Some of these techniques can also be used for the analysis of cognitive tasks where weU-practiced work methods must be adapted to task variations and new circumstances. This can be achieved provided that task analysis goes beyond the recommended work methods and explores task variations that can cause failures of human performance. Hierarchical task analysis (Shepherd 1989), for instance, can be used to describe how operators set goals and plan their activities in terms of work methods, antecedent conditions, and expected feedback. When the analysis is expanded to cover not only normal situations but also task variations or changes in circumstances, it would be possible to record possible ways in which humans may fail and how they could recover from errors. Table 2 shows an analysis of a process control task where operators start up an oil refinery furnace. This is a safety-critical task because many safety systems are on manual mode, radio communications between control room and on-site personnel are intensive, side effects are not visible (e.g., accumulation of fuel in the fire box), and errors can lead to furnace explosions. 

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. 

Penny 1, Eaton A, Bishop P, Bloomfield R. The practicalities of goal-based safety. Proceedings of the Ninth Safety-Critical Systems Symposium Bristol, UK, 6-8 Feb 2001. Springer, 2001 ISBN 1-85233-411-8 2001. p. 35-48. 

Menon C, Hawkins R, McDermid J. Defence Standard 00-56 Issue 4 towards evidence-based safety standards. Safety-critical systems problems, process and practice. York, UK 2009. p. 223-43. 

This chapter has presented a brief review of the main means and methods for the emerging field of SHM of safety-critical composite stmctures. The different physical principles employed by each approach have been detailed for the various sensor types, which may either focus on a specific (small) area or cover large areas of the structure. Examples have also been presented to illustrate the practical interpretation of the sensor-derived data. Considerable further research is needed, however, to mature the development of SHM sensors and methods to achieve viable practical implementation of this promising new technology. 

Bate, I. J., Burns, A., and Audsley, N. C. (1996). Putting fixed priority scheduUng theory into engineering practice for safety critical applications. In Proceedings of the 2nd Real-Time AppUcations Symposium. ... 

Controlling critical safety elements is pre-contact control. This is effort directed toward the prevention of undesired events. Once controls over certain critical elements are exercised, proactive safety is practiced. This determines the difference between a proactive and a reactive safety cnltnre. 

We interpret this as support for our notion that expertise in anaesthesia brings with it the authority to define the boundaries between routine and critical but also between acceptable and unacceptable practice. However, we suggest that such variability in what is considered critical, reportable and acceptable is a product of the culture of medicine. In other safety-critical industries, professional experience and judgement are not allowed to dictate reporting behaviour. In aviation, for instance, all pilots, regardless of rank or experience, are expected and required to describe and report even the most subtle and minor events, not just those deemed critical or serious by individual pilots. 

Penny, X, A. Eaton, et al. (2001). The Practicalities of Goal-Based Safety Regulation. Aspects of Safety Management Proceedings of the Ninth Safety-Critical Systems Symposium, Bristol, UK, Springer. 

In some coimtries like the Netherlands and UK same regulatory criteria are applied to all safety-critical industries, but in many other countries the criteria are dependent on the industry practices. 

The Human Factors analysts needed an approach and a tool to help them in providing a template for the interview process of a Task analysis with the ability to structure the interview phase in order to highlight and examine the deviations from standard practice. These deviations are fundamental to understanding what can and does go wrong in the field and should be an integral part of any safety critical task representation. A graphical representation of the procedure map linked to the template including ... 

Rae, A. (2007) Helping the Operator in the Loop Practical Human Machine Interface Principles for Safe Computer Controlled Systems, SCS 07 Proceedings of the twelfth Australian workshop on Safety critical systems and software and safety-related programmable systems—Volume 86 Pages 61-70. Australian Computer Society, Inc. Darhnghurst, Australia. 

Due to the importance of hardware testing on test tracks during development, a common practice for the evaluation in safety-critical situations is introduced here. In order to achieve a subjectively realistic but objectively uncritical situation for active safety functions, so-called targets are used on test tracks instead of real traffic participants. Whereas most targets are designed for sensor or system testing, some are also suitable for behavioral studies. Many targets represent vehicles, or what a sensor or driver can perceive of a vehicle. For radar this means that a triple reflector made of... 

Reports of medical device failure are numerous because responsible staff are aware of the safety critical nature of many of the products used to assist patients. Doctors and consultants do report and describe the failmes encoimtered in their practice, both in technical and professional journals, and often about individual pieces of equipment. They are an invaluable aid for investigators researching specific designs, as are the adverse incident reports from the FDA Maude website and more recently, a similar website run by the MDHA. 

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