Safety management systems state responsibility

The Task Force s mission is to design a state-of-the-art process safety management system that will support all of Company X s varied business operations, and to install it at a pilot site to be determined. The team will maintain ongoing communication with Division C s Facility Managers Council, which has accepted responsibility for focusing on the division s process safety management systems. 

Procedures/responsibilities the CER states a comprehensive health, environment and safety management system is in place describing the principles, policies, procedures and standards that are to be applied throughout the company . 

In order to reduce the number and severity of major events companies need to develop and implement a Safety Management System, or SMS. The details of an SMS vary from company to company and agency to agency, but they all tend to have broadly the same structure and content. In the United States, the agency responsible for offshore safety, the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement (BSEE), issued its Safety and Environmental Management System (SEMS) rule. The management elements of SEMS are shown in Table 1.2. 

Safety management system should state that all individuals are responsible for their own behavior and for monitoring others to prevent unsafe acts being undertaken. This should also be reinforced through training, appraisal, and review. 

Abeyratne R (2007) State responsibility for safety management systems. J Aviat Manag 2 7-13 Abeyratne R (2007) Air Law and Policy. PublishAmerica, Baltimore... 

The goal in applying the PDCA model is to improve processes. Taken as a whole, the processes make up the management system. In applying ZIO, processes are to be established and implemented to create an OHSMS. Although ZIO does state that employees shall assume responsibility for aspects of health and safety over which they have control, the focus of the standard is improving processes controlled by management. 

Secondly, the model is consistent with naturahstic explanations of expertbehaviour whereby action schema are frequently activated in response to environmental stimrrh with little or no conscious processing on behalf of the operator. Indeed, the model allows for situations whereby safety breaches are contained through immediate response to the emergence of a mismatch in system state. Accordingly, error management can itself be seen as dynamic expert behavioirr rather than a serial and rational process. 

Reactive safety management can work in principle if events do not occur so often that it becomes difficult or impossible to take care of the actual work, i.e., if responding to adverse events does not interfere with the primary activities. But if the frequency of adverse events increases, the need to respond will sooner or later require so much capacity and take so much time that the reactions become inadequate and will partly lag behind the process. Under such conditions the system will not have sufficient time to recover from the response and return to the normal productive state. In practice, it means that control of the situation is lost and with that the ability effectively to manage safety. 

---