Safety skills decision making

Ensure that those who are making safety-related decisions are fully informed and skilled. Establish mechanisms to allow and encourage all employees and contractors to contribute to safety-related decision making. 

It is unlikely that any individual, whether it is the laboratory supervisor, safety professional, planner, or architect, will alone be sufficiently knowledgeable orhave the requisite skills to make appropriate decisions for all of the factors discussed in this section. In addition, every one of these persons wiU have their own agenda. The inclusion of emergency preparedness features should be explicitly included as one of the charges to the building or project design committee... 

By accepting a former employer s road test certificate, you are also accepting their safety and hiring standards which may differ from those of your organization. In the same respect, someone new to the industry who passed his or her CDL road test still may not have acquired the confidence or decision-making skills for driving solo. Holding a certain class of CDL is not a definitive that the applicant is proficient. 

These aim at illustrating/conTuming the content covered in the chapter, hi the process, students will certainly develop manipulative skills and learn about safety procedures, practical equipment and procedures. However, there is no systematic and deliberate attempt at helping them develop skills and abihties needed to undertake scientific enquiry to critically analyse a situation, solve a problem and make decisions. 

The regulatory body shall employ a sufficient number of personnel with the necessary qualifications, experience and expertise to undertake its functions and responsibilities. It is hkely that there will be positions of a specialist nature and positions needing more general skills and expertise. The regulatory body shall acquire and maintain the competence to judge, on an overall basis, the safety of facilities and activities and to make the necessary regulatory decisions (Ret [1], para. 4.6). 

Regardless of incentives and information, travelers must be sufficiently competent to make good decisions. The belief that individuals are incompetent to make risky decisions arises from research on behavioral decision rules in complex situations and on attitudes. Traffic safety dedsions are suspect because risks may be misperceived and expected safety benefits may be undervalued. Ola Svenson and his colleagues, for example, report based on their attitudinal study that subjects show optimism bias they feel they are more skillful and safer than typical drivers. They state that drivers who feel immune may discount measures such as seat belts. A sununary of this and other representative evidence of representative incompetence is presented in column 2 of Table 2-1. Next to these results, in column 3, is the evidence of competence for each subject natural hazards and insurance, gambling, risk perception, and safety belt use. 

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