Safety effort

Develop methods to measure the effectiveness of inherent safety efforts and to provide feedback to personnel to improve performance. 

The first major objective for the inherent safety review is the development of a good understanding of the hazards involved in the process. Early understanding of these hazards provides time for the development team to implement recommendations of the inherent safety effort. Hazards associated with flammability, pressure, and temperature are relatively easy to identify. Reactive chemistry hazards are not. They are frequently difficult to identify and understand in the lab and pilot plant. Special calorimetry equipment and expertise are often necessary to fully characterize the hazards of runaway reactions and decompositions. Similarly, industrial hygiene and toxicology expertise is desirable to help define and understand health hazards associated with the chemicals employed. 

Chapter 1, The Role of Human Error in Chemical Process Safety, discusses the importance of reducing human error to an effective process safety effort at the plant. The engineers, managers, and process plant personnel in the CPI need to replace a perspective that has a blame and punishment view of error with a systems viewpoint that sees error as a mismatch between human capabilities and demands. 

While tlris qualitative technique is most commonly applied to operating process plants, it is also applicable to pilot plants, laboratories, storage facilities, or support functions. This comprehensive review is intended to complement other safety efforts and routine visual inspections. It should be treated as a cooperative effort to improve the overall safety and performance of the plant rather than as a dreaded intciference vvitli normal operations. Cooperation is essential. People tne likely to become defensive unless considerable effort is made to present the review as a benefit to each participant. 

An important theme continuing throughout Chapter 3 is the concept of inherent safety. In general, the scope of all safety efforts is to reduce the... 

Olsson, S. (1998). The role of the WHO Programme on International Drug Monitoring in coordinating worldwide drug safety efforts. Drug Safely 19 1-10. 

As in any process that uses cheniicals and electronic and mechanical equipment, a concerted safety effort is required in plasma etching. Proper shielding of reactors and power supplies to minimize operator exposure to rf radiation is imperative. An exposure level below 1 mW/cm has been suggested as a safe operating point (150). 

Progress in these areas after 10 years was reviewed at the World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg. Its Plan of Implementation (WSSD 2002) set the goal that by the year 2020 chemicals should be produced and used in ways that minimise significant adverse impacts on the environment and on human health. This has been the portal goal that has since been at the forefront of global chemical safety efforts, not least SAICM (Section 12.2.4.1). 

Information and data collected by other organizational data systems might be valuable to process safety efforts, but if other databases are fed into the metrics system, the interface between these systems must be defined. Organizations should identify what data collection systems exist and list those in the framework strategy. 

Despite all safety efforts, breakdowns and accidents cannot be completely avoided. Therefore basic instructions on proper behavior have to be given in case of such an event which is rationally foreseeable. For example, there should be a clear description of what is to be done in case of... 

Because injuries are rare events, they do not always reflect the sum total of daily performance of company employees and managers. Thus, while they are an accurate measure of overall company safety performance, they are an insensitive measure at the individual and departmental levels. Some experts feel that more basic information has to be collected to provide the basis for directing health and safety efforts. One proposed measure is to use first-aid reports from industrial clinics. These provide information on more frequent events than the injuries required to be reported by the OSHAct. It is thought that these occurrences can provide insights into patterns of hazards and/or behaviors that may lead to the more serious injuries and that their greater number provides a larger statistical base for determining accident potential. 

One easy way of finding out what trips an employee s creative trigger is simply to ask the employees and their families for their ideas and input. Involving the family with the quasi-family of employees in achieving the central and universal goal of safety will yield results. Remember, safety and loss prevention professionals want employees to think before they take risks in the workplace. What better way to make employees think about safety than to have their families involved and by supporting their safety efforts. 

For safety and loss prevention professionals who may be independent contractors or working for small entities, the Small Business Administration (SBA) may be a source of financial assistance to support the loss prevention and safety effort. The SBA provides a number of programs, including loans and financial packages, for various small business entities. 

While there are certainly some very effective safety engineering programs, too many expend a large amount of resources with little return on the investment in terms of improved safety. To fix a problem, we first need to understand it. Why are safety efforts sometimes not cost-effective lliere are five general answers to this question ... 

Safety efforts start too late Unlike the examples of ineffective safety activities above, the safety efforts may involve potentially useful activities, but they may start too late. Frola and Miller claim that 70-80 percent of the most critical decisions... 

The key to having a cost-effective safety effort is to embed it into a system engineering process starting from early concept development and then to design safety into the system as the design decisions are made. Costs are much less when safety is built into the system design from the beginning rather than added on or retrofitted later. 

The first step in any safety effort involves agreeing on the types of accidents or... 

Before any safety-related activities can start, the definition of an accident needs to be agreed upon by the system customer and other stakeholders. This definition, in essence, establishes the goals for the safety effort. 

The goal of understanding the dynamics is to redesign the system and the safety control structure to make them more conducive to system safety. For example, behavior is influenced by recent accidents or incidents As safety efforts are successfully employed, the feeling grows that accidents cannot occur, leading to reduction in the safety efforts, an accident, and then increased controls for a while until the system drifts back to an unsafe state and complacency again increases. .. 

This complacency factor is so common that any system safety effort must include ways to deal with it. SUBSAFE, the US. nuclear submarine safety program, has been particularly successful at accomplishing this goal. The SUBSAFE program is described in chapter 14. 

The upper left loop represents the Space Shuttle safety program, which when operating effectively is meant to balance the risks associated with loop Rl.The external influences of budget cuts and increasing performance pressures, however, reduced the priority of safety procedures and led to a decrease in system safety efforts. 

Adding to the problems is the fact that system safety efforts led to launch delays when problems were found, which created another reason for reducing the priority of the safety efforts in the face of increasing launch pressures. 

While reduction in safety efforts and lower prioritization of safety concerns may lead to accidents, accidents usually do not occur for a while so false confidence is created that the reductions are having no impact on safety and therefore pressures increase to reduce the efforts and priority even further as the external and internal performance pressures mount. 

The combination of the decrease in safety efforts along with loop B2 in which fixing the problems that were being found increased complacency, which also contributed to reduction of system safety efforts, eventually led to a situation of unrecognized high risk. 

Escaping from the Whack-a-Mole trap requires identifying and eliminating the systemic factors behind accidents. Some common reasons why safety efforts are often not cost-effective were identified in chapter 6, including ... 

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