Safety management system measurement

The health and safety culture of an organization is an important factor in ensuring the effectiveness of risk control. The health and safety management system is an important influence on the safety culture, which in turn impacts on the effectiveness of the health and safety management system. Measuring aspects of the safety culture therefore forms part of the overall process of measuring health and safety performance. (P-14)... 

Does your Safety Management System Measure Up ... 

CCPS G-55. Guidelines for Performance Measures for Continuous Improvement of Process Safety Management Systems. American Institute of Chemical Engineers, Center for Chemical Process Safety, New York. 

For company C, the main weakness of the safety management system is the implementation of the additional measures to enhance the safety barriers. The time lapse between observation and actual intervention is sometimes very long. No examples of affected safety barriers lining up could be retrieved, because most analysed precursors are immediately alleviated, preventing any escalation. 

The authors of the Guidelines for Risk Based Process Safety (KBPS) (CCPS, 2007a) described the need for constant vigilance as the price of maintaining an effective process safety management system. An operator not only must be vigilant (aware of both past and current performance), but must not assume that current performance will be maintained, much less improved, without intentional evaluation of critical parts of systems and their performance. Performance measurement and metrics are a critical part of the RBPS system. 

Process safety metrics are critical indicators for evaluating a process safety management system s performance. Tracking the number of process safety incidents is one common measure of performance, but merely tracking the number of incidents after the fact is insufficient to understand the system failure that allowed the incident to occur and what can be done to prevent a recurrence. More than one metric and more than one type of metric are needed to monitor performance of a process safety management system. A comprehensive process safety management system should contain a variety of different metrics that monitor different dimensions of the system and the performance of all critical elements. 

The information derived from reports of transportation incidents provides an excellent outcome measurement of the performance of a company s transportation safety management program. Information about the causes of transportation incidents not only provides the basis for proper corrective actions, but also provides useful lessons for the future, which can lead to improvements in the transportation safety management system. 

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. 

Ahmad, K. and Gibb, A. (2004) Towards effective safety performance measurement evaluation of existing techniques and proposals for the future. In S. Rowlinson (ed.). Construction Safety Management Systems, pp. 424-42. Spon Press, London. 

Safety isn t something that can necessarily be managed by tick-lists or generic inspection forms created by off-the-shelf safety management systems, indeed the ways we seek to measure and manage safety have been revealed within this book to be at times much less than helpful themselves. 

The comprehensive safety-management system includes the activation of the following safety systems and special measures ... 

All of the safety professionals with whom I spoke were affected by the World Trade Center tragedy, but not as much as I expected. They are employed in large companies that have extensive security staffs, on whom the responsibiUty for additional security measures fell. There is an overlapping of responsibility with security personnel since an element in all of their safety management systems pertains to Emergency and Disaster Planning, which will be addressed later. 

By its very existence, a standard for occupational safety management systems carrying the approval of the American National Standards Institute takes on considerable significance. Such a standard becomes the minimum against which the adequacy of the safety management systems in place is measured. Membership on the ZIO committee broadly represents the interests of employers, labor, government, and the public. Assuredly, the standard will be much publicized. 

This is meaty stuff. All elements in a safety management system, while necessary, do not equally impact on those hazards that present the greatest potential for harm, whether measured by incident frequency or severity of injury. Obviously, the safety management elements included, and those emphasized, in an audit system should relate to the hazards that an entity... 

There are some considerations that are supra to the individual elements in safety management systems. 1 have concluded that most safety, health, and environmental management system audits, intended to measure the quahty of hazards management in place, are deficient in purpose and content. 1 include in that observation the guidehnes used for the audits 1 drafted for individual client needs, the many audit reports 1 reviewed, and a study of several audit systems. 

An organizational framework or a safety management system is required to avoid accidents or incidents. It comprises procedures for monitoring the production process and the work environment such that hazards are understood and controlled. To this end hazard analyses for work places are carried out (cf. [5,7, 8]) and events are evaluated in order to identify and implement measures apt to avoid their recurrence or to make them at least less probable. This has to be a continuous process. 

Health and safety standards are targets or objectives that the company wants to achieve. They are measurable management performances. A structured safety management system (SMS) consists of a number of health and safety standards. Each element should have at least one standard, and some elements will require more than one standard. 

Standards in safety are referred to as measurable management performances. Standards are set for the level of work to be done to maintain a safe and healthy environment free from actual and potential accidental loss. Standards are established in writing for all the health and safety management system elements. 

A safety and health audit of the work being done to control loss measures the safety system and highlights its strengths and weaknesses. The audit compares work being done, and standards being maintained, with accepted safety and health standards. It can be used to review and evaluate the performance and effectiveness of the safety system, and also to establish whether or not it meets international safety management system standards. 

The second important part of safety management system is the stochastic model of navigational safety. The model could be used for risk assessment and in case when risk reduction measures are necessary. The model is capable to predict navigational safety... 

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