Safety Management System

Corrective action and change management programs secure the proportionate, prioritized close-out of actions arising from monitoring, investigations, audits, and safety management system reviews. Taking from the “Five Themes for Excellence in Safety Management Systems (SMS),” we can look at a facility’s approach to its Corrective Action Plans (CAP) process through this lens of excellence and…...

Have you ever seen the Wizard of Oz?  It is a classic and I highly recommend it, even as an adult first-time viewer.  But the theme of the movie can relate to the safety profession.  During my internship in the summer of 1992, I worked with a great safety professional, Garth Newman.  Garth was preparing…...

Be careful, experience shows that most who read this will find it offensive… Meet “Ed”, he is just a maintenance worker I meet in 1994.  My first impressions of Ed were he was safe (i.e. always followed the safe work practices, always had on his PPE properly, etc.) based on my personal observations.  One day…...

The gaps in the defense arise for two reasons – active failures and latent conditions – occurring either singly or in diabolical combinations. They are devilish because, in some cases, the trajectory of accident liability needs only exist for a very short time, sometimes only a few seconds:… Membership Required You must be a member...

Keep in mind the following was published in 1997 in Managing the risks of organizational accidents by James Reason.  And he was not the first to say it, but he may have been the best at explaining it!  Many organizations could make substantial improvements in their safety performance if they would just start measuring the…...

We all have one (1) common bias, psychologists call it the “fundamental attribution error.”   The fundamental attribution error is the tendency for people to over-emphasize dispositional or personality-based explanations for behaviors observed in others while under-emphasizing situational explanations.  And we have ALL DONE IT at some point in time after an accident.  In fact,…...

Many people talk as if a safety culture can only be achieved through some awesome transformation akin to a religious experience. We take the opposite view, arguing that a safety culture can be socially engineered by identifying and fabricating its essential components and then assembling them into a working whole. It is undoubtedly true that…...

An ideal culture of safety is the engine that continues to propel the safety management system towards the goal of maximum safety and health, regardless of the leadership’s personality or current commercial concerns. Such an ideal is hard to achieve in the real world, but it is nonetheless a goal worth striving for.  The power…...

Today I read in the news that a Police Chief of a metropolitan area announced his resignation amid a lot of turmoil in the city and within his Department.  And in the news story, I was taken back by the Metro Council President… “If the officers don’t feel in tune with their police chief, it…...

Independent, systematic audits check that risk-control systems and management arrangements within the Safety Management System (SMS) are effective.  An audit is an independent, systematic check of risk-control safeguards and the SMS to ensure business objectives are met. An audit can be an internal audit (first party, conducted by the organization) or an external audit (second…...

The first element is whether strategic plans and action plans integrate safety into all aspects of an organization’s activities. Are there measurable short, medium, and long-term safety objectives in these plans, and is there regular progress monitoring in implementing the plans? Monitoring progress by the senior management team is vital to good safety leadership. Regular…...