THE PERCEPTION OF SAFETY MANAGEMENT WITHIN SHIPPING COMPANIES

摘要

A good deal of attention has recently been drawn towards Safety Management (SM) in the shipping industry. The paper presents the shipping companies' perception of SM, analysed in 1997 through a questionnaire that was forwarded to randomly chosen companies with ships classed by Det Norske Veritas. The questions were intended to clarify: (1) How the companies characterised their accidental losses. (2) Which factors they conceived as causes for their losses. (3) Which measures they planned to implement to reduce losses and improve safety within their companies. From the findings it emerged that all companies held a strong belief in SM as an effective tool to improve safety. In spite of this, the companies gave low rating to the importance of work conditions, which they conceived as only a minor contributor to losses. Surprisingly, only a minor fraction of the companies intended to address work conditions in the future. This attitude was quite uniform, regardless of the experience with SM in the companies. Companies with SM experience had better understanding of their losses than companies with no experience, the latter claim to experience only minor losses in their organisations. SM is quite new to the industry, and only a few companies had more than four years experience with SM. The majority of the companies was already convinced of the effect of SM and had a strong will to further emphasise SM to improve safety. Implementation should focus on the smaller shipping companies, which were least positive to SM.