Process Safety Behaviours: What are they and how to they link to Occupational (Personal) Safety Behaviours

摘要

Occupational (Personal) Safety behaviours are well understood and successful programmes have been implemented worldwide to promote safe behaviours and eliminate unsafe behaviours. Process Safety behaviours, in contrast, have not been well defined and efforts to define them and improve them have been fragmented. In the well-known Process Safety triangle, the base of the triangle is often stated as "Unsafe behaviour or insufficient operating discipline". This is not usually illustrated by examples and implies that the only important Process Safety behaviours are those of the front line operating staff. Programmes to eliminate or reduce the incidence of poor Process Safety behaviours, however defined, have been minimal and there is little guidance on changing the impact of subtler Process Safety behaviours by, for example, engineers. By their nature, Process Safety behaviours can often be remote from the actual incident and consequence and the behaviour might have occurred months before the incident. The author will suggest several useful guidelines and recommendations from 30 years of running hazardous plant, dealing with many incidents and 18 years of consulting as a professional process safety engineer. These will deal with the following: What are typical Process Safety behaviours that are required for: 1. operating personnel; 2. engineering staff; 3. management. The links between Process Safety and Occupational Safety (Personal Safety) will be explored. The relationship between Process Safety behaviours and broader aspects like organisation culture and leadership will also be examined. The author will also include consideration of studies done on organisational decision making such as was evident in disasters like the Deepwater Horizon oil rig fire and explosion.