A technical subject
“I’m just a general health and safety manager” is a phrase we have heard when some delegates introduce themselves on a process safety management training course. The presence of the word “just” is quite telling and is almost as if the individual doesn’t believe that they can contribute to the field of process safety. Nothing could be further from the truth and in this short piece we look at why general occupational safety practitioners are key to good process safety management, along with how they can contribute.
Process Safety
Process Safety is concerned with events which are potentially high consequence, low likelihood and typically involves the storage, use and handling of dangerous substances. The subject is often seen as a technical subject and, for this reason, general occupational practitioners might lack the confidence to apply their skills to the subject. The reality is that good process safety management requires the application of organisational and technical skills to manage risks. The errors which occur in the lead up to a process safety incident are often numerous and have remained hidden for many years and, as such, are failures of the management systems. It therefore makes sense that general safety practitioners, who’s expertise is within safety management systems, should play a leading role in successful process safety management. Understanding the typical failings which occur prior to a process safety incident provides an insight into how general safety practitioners can achieve this.
Learning from Experience
While errors of a technical nature are always possible, it is more likely that process safety incidents involve a series of systematic errors, over the longer term and at multiple levels within the organisation. The US Chemical Safety Board (CSB) website U.S. Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board | CSB contains the outputs of investigations following process safety incidents, including animated videos. The incidents investigated have common immediate causes such as the failure to follow procedures, by-passing critical safeguards and failing to look after safety critical equipment, to name a few. Without exception, these immediate causes are always coupled with one or more underlying causes. These usually boil down to the fact that the immediate causes were present for quite some time and either not known by the organisation, or they were known but not acted upon despite repeat warnings.
Following the Buncefield incident, Gordon MacDonald of the UK Health and Safety Executive (HSE) challenged the industry to ask three questions.
1) Do we understand what can go wrong?
2) Do we know what our systems are to prevent this from happening?
3) Do we have information to assure us that they are working effectively?
Most often, it is the answer to the third question which is missing in the lead up to a process safety incident. The solution to this issue is just the implementation normal of safety management systems (SMS) such as safety metrics, audits, safety tours and management reviews. It is for this reason that general occupational health and safety practitioners should play a vital role in process safety management. So why is this so often missing in the lead up to a process safety incident?
Confidence and Familiarity
For several decades now there has been a large focus on improving occupational safety performance and great improvements have been made during this time. We, however, only see what we are looking for and safety metrics will tend to measure LTI’s while safety tours and near miss reporting systems will predominantly report occupational health and safety issues. This issue is compounded by the fact that process safety issues are normally less obvious to identify and, perhaps, a lack of confidence of general practitioners to tackle what is seen to be a specialist technical subject. The occupational safety professional can, however, contribute greatly to the monitoring, audit, review, leadership and engagement parts of process safety. The challenge is only really to ensure that those systems are aligned with process safety as well as occupational safety. In addition to the three questions asked earlier, ask yourself:
- Do we have process safety performance indicators which are communicated throughout the organisation and cover our key risk control systems?
- Do our corporate audits cover process safety in sufficient detail?
- Do leadership and safety tours involve talking to frontline staff about process safety?
Successfully tackle these and your process safety performance will improve dramatically, even if you are “just a general health and safety manager”.
