TRAINING & EDUCATION
THE TWO ESSENTIALS
What should different industries look at to ensure that process safety is always at the forefront of people’s minds? NEBOSH Head of Strategy Matt Powell- Howard, outlines the key elements of best practice.
When we think about safety, we tend
to focus on steps that can be taken to prevent a reasonably foreseeable accident, such as wearing personal protective equipment (PPE) or placing a guard on a piece of machinery. Process safety, which is all about safety in high hazard process industries such as chemicals, some food manufacturing and oil and gas, tends to be more complex.
This is primarily because of the potential for things to go spectacularly wrong. Major incidents such as the Bhopal disaster, which exposed more than half a million people in India to toxic gas in 1984, and the Deep Water Horizon oil rig explosion of 2010, which killed eleven workers and led to the biggest oil spill in US history, sadly, illustrate this well.
So, while standard safety elements, such as PPE or machine guarding remain important, in process safety there is also a need to focus on specialist technical controls and robust safety management systems to prevent the very worst from happening.
There are two key elements of best practice that relevant industries should look at to ensure process safety is at the forefront of people’s minds. These are leadership and competence.
LEADERSHIP It is crucial that leaders in process industries inspire
the highest level of commitment to process safety excellence. Leaders need to adopt a style and approach that has a positive influence on overall culture through engagement, stewardship and accountability.
In a practical sense, this means having at least one member of the board fully conversant in process safety management, to ensure high-level representation, decision making and effective communication. Strong leadership around process safety is not just a matter of knowledge and inspiring others from the top-down.
Process safety has to be adequately resourced, from a human, financial and physical perspective. Making sure the organisation has the right people with the
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right skills and experience, appropriate budgets and suitable equipment, infrastructure and facilities, is essential.
As well as having a mind for the human cost of process safety failures, leaders should also consider the potential financial consequences when it comes to level of resource. BP reported in 2018 that the total estimated cost of the 2010 Deepwater Horizon spill had increased to $65bn and could increase further.
COMPETENCE Setting a culture of safety is not only limited to leaders
and top management. It is important to build trust and empower employees and contractors to share and drive in sustainable day-to-day behaviour and compliance.
The essential element here is competence. Competence is a combination of practical and thinking skills, experience and knowledge and it can produce a workforce capable of taking on responsibilities and carry out activities to a recognised standard. What is important here is defining the process safety critical tasks which need to be performed that are routine, non-routine and emergency in nature. Examining these tasks, including the potential for human error, and then looking at the required capabilities, helps to develop a process safety competence management system (PSCMS).
An effective PSCMS supports recruitment, the identification of skills-gaps, training needs, overall ownership in emergency situations and continuous improvement.
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