System safety professionals focus

Because the system safety professional focuses more attention where there are no or insufficient knowledge bases, some in industry perceive that the scope of the system safety discipline is just in those areas, where little or no knowledge bases exist. However, the scope of the system safety discipline is much broader and the system safety professional must have a complete understanding of how to use and apply the existing safety resources, in addition to when to use other system safety analyses to evaluate the entire system throughout its entire life cycle. Some colleagues refer to system safety as the umbrella safety, since you must draw upon all safety resources for the tech-... 

Part 6 provides a discussion of professionalism that is important reading for the student and practitioner as well. The focus is on the system safety professional, but much of the information pertains to other related environmental, health, and safety fields. 

In a form appropriate to the organization in which a safety professional provides counsel, a system of the sort outhned in this National Safety Council pubhcation should result in focusing on actual causal factors and on the development of effective corrective actions. For those who make incident investigations infrequently, a modification of the Guide for Identifying Causal Factors and Corrective Actions would serve as a valuable memory jogger. Such a Guide is included in this chapter. 

Accountability versus blame. Health care professionals are accountable for their work. They have a responsibility to possess current knowledge and competence in the work they perform they also have a responsibility to acknowledge the interdependence they have in their performance. In addition, they must appreciate how systems work and understand that people are the human components of systems, both contributing to failure and creating safety. Blame focuses on a scapegoat rather than on the pursuit of deeper understanding about failure. The traditional blame, shame, and punish methods have not worked to improve safety. Blameless versus punitive or retaliatory. A blameless environment is one where the front line is comfortable reporting failures and near misses so they can be studied in this kind of environment, the front line even feels compelled to report failures. A punitive or retaliatory environment creates an atmosphere where sharp end staff members are afraid to disclose failures and near misses, and in this way opportunities to learn from mistakes are eliminated. 

Unfortunately, such an analytical method—focusing on the first proximate and most easily prevented cause and assigning but one causal factor for an accident— would produce questionable results. Many safety professionals have promoted safety management systems that focus extensively on what the worker does, meaning on the prevention of worker unsafe acts. (I did that early in my career.) And some management personnel have been taught by safety professionals that the focus of their safety management systems should be principally on worker behavior. 

Safety professionals will do a better job in giving counsel on serious injury prevention if they are aware of human error causal factors. Focusing on improving management systems to meet ZIO provisions and minimizing serious injuries, this chapter ... 

If all safety professionals accept the premise that hazard identification and risk assessment are to be the first steps in preventing injuries to personnel, a major concept change in the practice of safety will have been achieved. Adopting that premise takes the focus away from what have been called the unsafe acts of workers and redirects it to work system causal factors. This represents sound thinking. 

In Chapter 4, Human Error Reduction, I encouraged safety professionals to enfold human error reduction concepts into every facet of safety management systems and to focus on system deficiencies resulting from human errors that occur above the worker level. 

Since failures at the management, design or technical expert levels of the company affect the design of the workplace and the work methods— that is, the operating system—it is logical to suggest that safety professionals should focus on system improvement to attain acceptable risk levels rather than principally on affecting worker behavior. 

As knowledge has evolved about how accidents occur and their causal factors, the emphasis is now properly placed on improving the work system, rather than focusing on the worker. A colleague who gets disturbed when he learns of safety professionals referencing Heinrich s premises as fact writes in an email that It is borderline unethical on their part. ... 

A central goal within transportation safety is that travelling and mobility should be as safe and efficient as possible. In an effort to achieve this goal, transportation safety professionals often focus on developing safety systems (e.g., road safety countermeasures) centred on the vehicle or the environment with the expectation that drivers will learn to interact with and adapt to the newly developed safety systems in ways that are consistent with their intended goals. However, drivers have a remarkable ability to adapt to safety systems in ways that are unanticipated by those who develop the safety systems this adaptation can serve to meet the needs of the driver but be counterproductive to safety and efficiency. Within this chapter and book, these unanticipated changes are generally referred to as behavioural adaptations. 

Krause s speech titled Moving to the Second Generation in Behavior-Based Safety is included in the Proceedings for the 2000 ASSE Professional Development Conference. To say that the focus of improvement is not on the worker, but on the systems that enable safe behavior is a major conceptual change in behavioral safety. Can it be doubted that Krause presents a substantial shifting in behavioral safety concepts ... 

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