www.hellenicshippingnews.com/mca-colla…

The Maritime and Coastguard Agency (MCA) has collaborated with the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) to build on the existing Safety Climate Tool by making it more applicable to the Maritime industry. The tool is designed to assess the attitudes of individuals within an organisation towards health and safety issues, then deliver an objective measure of the safety culture. It comes as part of the UK Flag’s continued drive towards improved safety awareness, with the MCA supporting a maritime version of HSE’s safety climate tool. It has been shown that a poor safety culture is the root cause of many incidents within the workplace, and the remote nature of a lot of seafarer roles means an incident is often serious, even fatal. The tool has been designed by scientists at the HSE, with advice from experts at the MCA and shipping companies, to measure the perceptions of the workforce on health and safety issues. It will offer insight into the safety culture of the organisation to provide ways to continually improve and raise standards, with hopes it will lead to a reduction in the number of incidents.