Safety culture and human factors

SAFETY CULTURE AND HUMAN FACTORS Safety culture 

This concept has long standing in the nuclear safety field. This fundamental safety principle is applicable to all activities and organizations related to nuclear power. This principle is understood and accepted globally as an essential element of safety for both current and future plants. 

There is general agreement that human factors considerations should be incorporated into every step of the design process for future reactors. 

This concept has traditionally focussed on the time interval between the onset of an accident condition and the first required human intervention in the functioning of safety systems that the designer is expected to accommodate in the design. This number has traditionally been 30 minutes, but the target grace period for some proposed designs has been extended significantly. 

Future plants are designed to more explicitly accommodate challenges to safety hmctions in non-power states. 

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Fundamental design approaches Accident considerations Safety goals and decision processes Safety culture and human factors Miscellaneous issues. 

The last area addressed by the systems approach is concerned with global issues involving the influence of organizational factors on human error. The major issues in this area are discussed in Chapter 2, Section 7. The two major perspectives that need to be considered as part of an error reduction program are the creation of an appropriate safety culture and the inclusion of human error reduction within safety management policies. 

Helmreich, R. L., and Sherman, P. (1994), Fhghtcrew Perspective on Automation A Cross-Cultural Perspective. Report of the Seventh ICAO Flight Safety and Human Factors Regional Seminar, Montreal, Canada International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), pp. 442-453. 

Shorrock, S.T. 2012. Safety culture in your hands Discussion cards for understanding and improving safety culture, lu M. Audersou (ed.). Contemporary Ergonomics and Human Factors 2012. Londou Taylor and Francis, 321-8. 

Steven T. Shorrock is Project Leader, Safety Development at EUROCONTROL and Adjunct Senior Lecturer at the University of New South Wales, School of Aviation. Steve has a background in human factors, safety culture and system safety practice. His research encompasses aviation, rail, chemical and energy issues and has been undertaken in higher education and at Federal Government level. He is a Registered Eigonomist and Chartered Psychologist. 

Madsen, M. D., Andersen, H. B., Itoh, K., Assessing Safety Culture and Climate in Healthcare, in Handbook of Human Factors and Ergonomics in Healthcare and Patient Safety, edited by P. Carayon, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Mahwah, New Jersey, 2007, pp. 693-713. 

Chapter 3 presents introductory aspects of safety and human factors. Chapter 4 is devoted to methods considered useful to perform patient safety analysis. These methods include failure modes and effect analysis (FMEA), fault tree analysis (FTA), root cause analysis (RCA), hazard and operability analysis (HAZOP), six sigma methodology, preliminary hazard analysis (PFfA), interface safety analysis (ISA), and job safety analysis (JSA). Patient safety basics are presented in Chapter 5. This chapter covers such topics as patient safety goals, causes of patient injuries, patient safety culture, factors contributing to pahent safety culture, safe practices for better health care, and patient safety indicators and their selection. 

The components of the SCMM were based on the safety culture features listed in the Health and Safety Executive s human factors guidance document HS(G)48 (HSE, 1999). The initial model was tested by interviewing safety experts, operational managers, safety representatives and frontline staff about their company s safety culture development and the applicability of the SCMM. This led to the definition of a Safety Culture Maturity Model, with five levels of maturity (as shown in Figure 1) and ten elements, namely ... 

For a hazard to exist, three hazard components must be present (1) the HS which provides the basic source of danger, (2) the potential IMs that will transition the hazard from an inactive state to a mishap event, and (3) the TTO that will result from the expected mishap event. The HS and IM are the HCFs that are used to determine risk likelihood, and the TTO is the causal factor that estabhshes risk outcome and severity. The HS and IM hazard components can be broken into the major causal factor categories of hardware, software, humans, interfaces, functions, procedures, management safety culture, and the environment. Since hazard risk is the same as mishap risk, HCFs are also mishap causal factors because they are the same factors used to compute the risks. 

It also made use of nuclear work on safety culture and work from REAIMS on organisational learning and human factors (Bloomfield et al. 1998). 

In this chapter we will rephrase, summarise and extend the set of practical aspects related to designing and implementing near miss reporting systems. First five general factors will be listed, followed by a more detailed discussion of two of these data collection, and acceptability. Also the overall important factor of training will be briefly outlined, Finally the relationship between an organisation s prevailing view of human error and its safety culture will be discussed. 

We discussed the use of system training as a control in Sect. 15.3. Whilst human factors generally represent controls at the least effective end of the spectrum many systems rely on the behaviour of users to mitigate risk to some extent. Training is one way by which users can be encouraged to adopt consistent behaviours and develop a culture of best practice. If one intends to justify in the safety case that risk... 

As can be seen from Fig. 5, in the second sixth simulation, the impact of human factors on safety performance whose time cut down more than six months to achieve an expected safety performance is the most obvious. The next impact is management factors. The adjustment of other three factors is no significant difference. The impact of human and management factors on safety performance become more and more strong. Because staff s increased safety awareness can build safety culture, which can t be matched by other physical factors. 

According to the ACSNl Study Group on Human Factors (HSC, 1993), a written corporate statement on the safety policy and organization should be a crucial element in the promotion and maintenance of a positive safety culture within the organization. Its objective should be to establish the corporate attitude to safety and the organizational framework through which the safety objectives can be assured. (Health and Safety Executive, 2001, p. 8)... 

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