Safety management processes arrangements

Each of these processes is addressed in more detail below. Other important safety management processes that are not included here include operating and maintenance procedures, project quality assurance arrangements, the control of subcontractors, and security arrangements (including information technology security, as discussed in Chapter 3). 

Common sense and the OSHA Process Safety Management standard require a formal method to effectively deal with change in the chemical industry. The safety designed into the original process often occurs after a multidisciplined design team agonized for the optimum arrangement of process and layout. This process safety must not be jeopardized by modification schemes of poor quality. 

The processes involved in managing these issues are likely to reside in the realm of project management rather than within the SMS as many issues will not be related to safety. A strong project manager will arrange regular risk and issue review sessions ensuring that each concern has an owner and documented action plan. 

The COMAH Regulations require dutyholders to set out a Major Accident Prevention Policy (MAPP). This would be the logical place to record policies relating to process safety management. Dutyholders also need fo ensure that they have effective arrangements to implement each element of the policy. 

Companies should actively engage with others within their sector and elsewhere to share good practice and information on process safety incidents that may benefit others. Companies should have mechanisms and arrangements in place to incorporate learning from others within their process safety management programmes ... 

A key element of successful health and safety management is the ability of the organisation to learn from its experiences. Arrangements should be made so that proactive data (e.g. from audit results) and reactive data (e.g. from incidents) in one area of an organisation are shared with other areas in the organisation. In this way, areas have the opportunity to learn from the experiences of others and to consider whether they have similar deficiencies in their systems and processes. The availability of electronic mail systems greatly facilitates the rapid sharing of such information. The information format should provide ... 

Westinghouse has an established organisational structure and arrangements to deliver effective safety management through to the end of the GDA process. Thereafter, the licensee will assume responsibility for the safety management of the constmction, the operation and the eventual decommissioning of the plant. 

Look at a vertical slice where the arrangements to control a specific hazard, as in the case of fire, are audited in terms of the policy, organisation, planning and implementing, measurement and review processes in relation to fire safety management. 

A safety survey is a detailed examination of a number of critical areas of operation, e.g. process safety, manual handling operations, or an in-depth study of the whole health and safety operations of a workplace. A survey examines, for instance, health and safety management procediues, environmental working conditions, occupational health and hygiene arrangements, the wide field of safety and accident prevention, and the system for the provision of information, instruction and training for staff and other persons affected by the organisation s operations. 

Structure, whether it is a matrix or linear arrangement, as long as it is considered an important business function and given the required visibility, commitment, funding, and personnel. Like any business function, process safety needs its plaee in the management structure. 

This system of work leads to a major disjunction between safety and compensation. At law, employers are responsible for compensation and must carry workers compensation insurance. Thus the subcontracting firms carry the main costs of workers compensation. However, the principal contractor exercises close control over the subcontractors and even over their employees. In these circumstances the law imposes the primary responsibility for the safety of these workers on the principal contractor. (Subcontractors are responsible at law only to the extent that they exercise real control over the work process.) The result of these arrangements is that compensation costs cannot provide safety incentives so far as project management is concerned. Insofar as the principal contractor is safety conscious this must be for reasons other than the costs of compensation. By way of qualification, it should be noted that some industry leaders are now employing a greater proportion of the workers on site directly. Where this happens the disjunction will be correspondingly blurred. 

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