NBAF UPDATE | Becoming highly reliable in protecting the U.S. … Austin will develop and manage the NBAF training program that will be required for everyone who will work in and around containment — the secure area where the biohazards will be located. In addition to developing NBAF’s biorisk training program, Austin is one of the many individuals who is championing a new NBAF initiative: to become a high reliability organization, or HRO. These organizations have high risk potential but a strong safety culture and an emphasis on planning to prevent major system failures. Some examples of HROs include aircraft carriers, air traffic control, nuclear power plants, fire departments and critical health care facilities.
According to Austin, HROs focus on solving small process failures to prevent large ones. These unique organizations accomplish this by empowering everyone at an institution to stop work and address possible safety concerns before they become a large issue. They also encourage everyone to actively look for areas where there could be failure and determine how best to mitigate. This “focus on failure” as Austin puts it, is designed so that large-scale failure can be prevented.
We are still defining what an HRO will look like at NBAF, but we already know that it is an important part of the safety culture we’re developing. This is one of the many reasons why it is important to use the time before NBAF becomes operational for planning. …
Crew safety: Lesson from the aviation industry
The safety and wellbeing of both crew and vessel are the primary responsibility of any skipper.
Without exception every crew leader will attest to this and yet it is nearly impossible to find a single MAIB (Marine Accident Investigation Branch) report that doesn’t attribute a safety failure to some degree of human error and breakdown in communication, sometimes with catastrophic results. So, what are we in the sailing world doing wrong?
To answer this question it pays to look at the aviation industry, which has acknowledged and addressed the impact of ‘human factors’ for almost 40 years.
With a single passenger aircraft carrying up to 800 people, eliminating error is absolutely critical in flight.
In 1981 United Airlines introduced Crew Resource Management (CRM) training, to try and improve safety by focusing on interpersonal communication, leadership and decision making in the cockpit of an airliner. The CRM model proved so successful it has since become ingrained in aviation safety culture.
Isle of Wight Ambulance Service staff among the happiest in country
THE latest NHS staff survey results show that people working at Isle of Wight NHS Trust are seeing improvements to their work life.
Among the positives were the quality of care, safety culture and the health and wellbeing support on offer to staff, plus improvements to morale and staff engagement.
More people are recommending the trust as a place to work and there was an increase in the number of staff happy with the standard of care provided.
The Ambulance Service recorded some of the best results in the country, scoring highest in its category for eight out of ten key themes.
Overall, the trust has seen improvements across its workforce in six key areas — quality of care, safety culture, safe environment - bullying and harassment, health and wellbeing, staff engagement and morale.
However, the survey highlighted several areas for improvement, including how the trust involves staff in decision-making, how teams discuss their effectiveness and people’s experience of violence in the workplace.
New EU regulation defines “Food Safety Culture”
The European Union (EU) recently adopted a regulation requiring food business operators to establish and provide evidence of an appropriate food safety culture and detailing the steps they must take to satisfy this obligation. Food safety culture also is a priority area within the United States, and it is one of the four pillars of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) New Era of Smarter Food Safety. However, there are no FDA regulations or guidance documents defining food safety culture. Although the EU regulation is not enforceable for food sold in the United States, the regulation may be of interest to U.S. food companies because it helps identify what it means to regulators for a food company to have a strong food safety culture and the types of activities that potentially can demonstrate that a company is fostering a strong food safety culture within its business.
On 3 March 2021, the European Commission adopted Commission Regulation (EU) 2021/382, which amends an existing food safety regulation ((EC) No 852/2004). EU 2021/282 adds the following new chapter to EC No 852/2004:
GENERAL SHEET METAL WORKS INC. Company overcomes 2020 challenges with improved safety protocols
In September 2020, as the world faced the challenges of COVID-19, wildfires and hazardous air quality from the smoke presented a new level of safety concerns. Safety Manager Raymon Brison was charged with figuring out how to run the fabrication shop at General Sheet Metal Works Inc. safely. The company quickly implemented a Respiratory Protection Program and had a stock of 3M 6500 series half-face respirators stored away. The leadership team reviewed all safety options, including closing outside air dampers, adding air cleaning HEPA portable units and using respirators. “Working our plan and planning our work as a team was the key to ensuring everyone’s safety,” Brison said. “Special thanks to Respexam for getting all the medical evaluations complete in record time to allow the next step of fit-testing on over 30 employees. That was a critical step in our Respiratory Protection Program that allowed us to safely operate, keeping our clients satisfied.” General Sheet Metal Works’ safety culture is imbedded from the first day of employment and starts with “See Something Say Something.” It gauges its safety culture through feedback from anonymous employee surveys.
Nearly half of hospital staff unwell through stress in 2020
David Wilkinson, director of people and organisational development at the trust, said: “The NHS has never before experienced a year like this one and the 2020 staff survey gives us an opportunity to understand our colleagues’ experiences.
“Both in Morecambe Bay and across the NHS, the pandemic has, of course, affected colleague experience. For example, at UHMBT and nationally, perceptions about immediate managers, team working and work-related stress have all worsened in 2020 as the need for fast decisions, deployment to different departments or roles and new practices took hold.
“Significantly more colleagues gave positive answers to questions relating to safety culture which had deteriorated in 2019, but there is still work to do to return to the higher scores of 2018.
Ben Maden, the chair of union staff side for UHMBT, said: “After one of the most intense years the NHS has ever faced, now is the time for coming together, learning and making many more positive changes for the benefit of all staff at UHMBT. While it is easy to dwell on the low points, we must not forget all of the positive progress we’ve made.”
Nuclear safety bolstered since Fukushima accident, says Grossi
The IAEA has put in thousands of man-hours and compiled thousands of pages of data and knowledge about the accident, Grossi said in the video statement.
“Within just a few months of the accident, the IAEA had developed a comprehensive action plan to strengthen the global nuclear safety framework and Member States had endorsed it. Around the world, operators’ engineers analysed their nuclear reactors and made upgrades where necessary. Today, virtually all Member States with nuclear power plants have completed ‘stress tests’ and many make use of the IAEA’s expert peer-review missions.”
Grossi said the IAEA has built a single platform that promotes clear nuclear safety practices for existing sites and those being developed and constructed. “Our work has not only led to concrete improvements in the safety of nuclear sites; it has created a sustained and robust global safety culture.
“We have developed and improved Safety Standards, norms and guidance. The adoption of the Vienna Declaration brought together all parties of the Convention on Nuclear Safety to reinforce its principles.”
An important lesson of the Fukushima Daiichi accident, Grossi said, is that regulators must be “strong, independent and adequately resourced”.
New Report Details Continued High Serious Injury Rate in Transportation & Warehousing … Developing a culture of safety — In addition to contractor characteristics and incident-specific data, information on safety culture and employee and contractor perceptions at an organization are key leading indicators for SIFs. In fact, 75 percent of the surveyed hiring clients believe improving safety culture and value alignment is an effective approach to reducing SIFs. …
A Safety Services announcement asked: “Did you know that Shriners Hospital also contains UC Davis research labs?” Shriners Hospital for Children-Northern California sits adjacent to UC Davis Medical Center in Sacramento.
The answer: Yes, Shriners Hospital houses UC Davis research labs. Kiho Cho started the safety committee in early 2019 and it has met regularly since, addressing unique issues that can arise from working in a combination hospital/research area. Cho is a professor of surgery at UC Davis Health and an associate investigator and manager of burn research at the Shriners hospital.
Adrienne Zweifel, associate biosafety officer, and Elizabeth Ingham, School of Medicine safety officer, nominated the committee for the Safety Star award, stating: “Dr. Cho recruited other researchers to create a research safety committee whose mission has been to identify and alleviate confusion surrounding general safety procedures and reporting requirements. This supports a proactive safety culture. The committee members work together to identify and resolve safety concerns.”
Another gold price spike ‘is coming’ - Barrick Gold CEO … Hambro pointed out that capital flows are changing dramatically towards more ESG-compliant companies. “It is not just a function of liquidity, but it’s a fundamental shift in capital markets. This is about investing from a more evolved perspective into companies that are compliant through the ESG lens.”
Being a good steward of the environment is core to the mining companies, Bristow said, noting that there needs to be a standardized format and investors could have access to. “One of the critical issues is trying to get equivalency. To get one version of the truth that is trusted. That is a challenge to the industry. We need to embrace our critics and work with our institutions,” he said. “What we haven’t done a good job of is make it uniform.”
The ESG standardization is like the early days of safety culture and reporting of incidents, Hambro said. “There were lots of metrics that people were using. It took a while to become standardized. But now that it is, the industry has become much safer.”
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Shipowner’s Club initiates 2021 Safety Culture campaign
Instilling a healthy Safety Culture can have many benefits for Members, regardless of the size of marine operation concerned.
Apart from the commercial advantages such as improved operational efficiencies, a healthy Safety Culture can result in happy healthy crew which in turn may result in reduced incident rates.
The Shipowner’s Club’s 2021 Safety Culture campaign aims to provide Members with the tools and resources to refer to, when considering their own organisational Safety Culture and utilise where there are any opportunities for improvement.
“All of our resources in this campaign have been created in collaboration with industry experts in their respective fields,” the Club stated.
Ep. 68 Are safety cases an impending crisis?
EPISODE SUMMARY
Safety cases have been around since the inception of nuclear power. Now, safety cases have spread all the way to amusement parks. They are always linked to major accidents.
EPISODE NOTES
Today, we plan to discuss whether safety cases are headed towards an impending crisis.
Join us as we figure out if the work safety community is headed for disaster.
Topics:
Shifting the burden of proof. The notion of “anti-safety”. Making the implicit, explicit. Trends of the past. Impediments to research. Variant and process theories. Disrupting beliefs and ideas to create a more favorable outcome. Why collaboration matters.
Quotes:
“…It’s a little bit paradoxical: Because why do we try to identify hazards, if not making the implicit claim that by trying to identify hazards and control them, we are making our system safer?”
“People don’t share their safety case data with anyone they don’t have to share it with.”
“And if we can turn the reasons why people do things into theories, and then test those theories, then we’ve got good potential for changing how people do things…”
Building a food safety culture requires buy-in from everyone
Anyone who has spent a few years working in the food industry, whether you are involved with the production of foods, beverage or ingredients, knows the truth of Murphy’s Law: Anything that can go wrong will go wrong.
It is up to the processor’s management team and staff to build the programs necessary to keep Mr. Murphy out of their operation. One of the tools that more and more operations are adopting is what is known as “the food safety culture.” The term may be relatively new, but the philosophy is not. In fact, the philosophy may well go back as far as 1844, when Alexandre Dumas wrote “The Three Musketeers.” In other words:
“All for one and one for all, united we stand, divided we fall.”
In other words, everyone in the operation is working together towards a common goal of food safety. The “food safety culture” verbiage may be relatively recent, but there are food processors that have adopted the philosophy all over the world. As an example, I was in a facility in Southeast Asia once that had developed its own food safety culture. At their morning management meeting, the management staff stood and together recited their food safety philosophy. It turned out that each and every worker in the plant not only knew this philosophy, but were able to explain it and their role in ensuring the production of safe, high quality products; all for one and one for all.
Barcelona will launch a new clinical trial on March 27. It will do it at the Palau Sant Jordi in Barcelona, welcoming 5,000 people for a concert of the Love Of Lesbian group without safety distance. An act in which, despite not having anti-COVID measures, all attendees will be forced to pass a series of preliminary checks, as an antigen test or taking the temperature before entering the room.
This was announced this Friday by the directors of different festivals such as Primavera Sound -with its 2021 edition already canceled-, Sonar, Cruïlla, Canet Rock or Vida, during an event at the Estadi Olímpic de Barcelona. There were also present the highest representatives of Health and Culture of the Generalitat and the mayor of the city, Ada Colau, supporting the safe culture on which so much has been insisted these months ago.
The concert last December: almost 500 attendees and no contagion
This new essay comes after the great results obtained with a concert of almost 500 people in the Sala Apolo. It took place last December and, as reported by Dr. Josep Maria Llibre, from the Germans Trias Hospital, the trial ended without contagion among its 463 attendees. The best result that could have been given and to the surprise of those who studied the case.
As detailed in the published statement on the website of the Festivals for Safety Culture, This clinical trial as a “pilot concert” at the Palau Sant Jordi will be carried out with a “subsequent control crossing data from attendees with the public health system”.
10 years after Fukushima, safety is still nuclear power’s greatest challenge
Ten years ago, on March 11, 2011, the biggest recorded earthquake in Japanese history hit the country’s northeast coast. It was followed by a tsunami that traveled up to 6 miles (10 kilometers) inland, reaching heights of over 140 feet (43.3 meters) in some areas and sweeping entire towns away in seconds. This disaster left nearly 20,000 people dead or missing. It also destroyed the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station and released radioactive materials over a large area. The accident triggered widespread evacuations, large economic losses and the eventual shutdown of all nuclear power plants in Japan. A decade later, the nuclear industry has yet to fully to address safety concerns that Fukushima exposed. We are scholars specializing in engineering and medicine and public policy, and have advised our respective governments on nuclear power safety. Kiyoshi Kurokawa chaired an independent national commission, known as the NAIIC, created by the Diet of Japan to investigate the root causes of the Fukushima Daiichi accident. Najmedin Meshkati served as a member and technical adviser to a committee appointed by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences to identify lessons from this event for making U.S. nuclear plants safer and more secure. Those reviews and manyothers concluded that Fukushima was a man-made accident, triggered by natural hazards, that could and should have been avoided. Experts widely agreed that the root causes were lax regulatory oversight in Japan and an ineffective safety culture at the utility that operated the plant.
H2O Innovation Strengthens its Health & Safety Program and Earns ISO Certifications for Genesys
QUEBEC CITY, March 02, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) – (TSXV: HEO) – H2O Innovation Inc. (“H2O Innovation” or the “Corporation”) is pleased to announce that one of its specialty chemicals business lines, Genesys, has obtained two new ISO certifications, demonstrating its continued commitment to respecting and promoting health and safety at work.
As part of the Corporation’s 3-Year Strategic Plan announced a few months ago, one of the main objectives was to create a safer working environment with top tier health, safety and environmental (“HSE”) practices. The well-being of the Corporation’s employees and the protection of the environment are priorities for H2O Innovation and essential to its strong culture. “Some high-profile industrial clients even require suppliers to adopt best practices with regards to environmental, social and governance (“ESG”) factors and HSE. Focusing on continuous improvement in these areas should enable us to raise our profile as a supplier and differentiate ourselves from the competition,” stated Frédéric Dugré, President and CEO of H2O Innovation.
Your Role in Improving EMS Flight Safety
You’re on the scene of a terrible car crash and decide to request a helicopter air ambulance to transport a patient. In the moment, you’re probably not thinking about all the things that occur behind the scenes after you make that request, but helicopter operators are making a lot of important decisions, some of which you—the emergency responder—can influence.
After your call, the operator should assess the risks—such as weather, flight conditions, and which pilot is on duty—to determine if it’s safe to accept the flight. How—and if—those risks are assessed and mitigated can determine whether the medical flight transport leads to success or tragedy.
Let’s look at an accident involving a medical transport flight where the risks were successfully evaluated by two companies, but, unfortunately, not by another.
Building Strong Safety Culture with Human Factors Training
Safety Culture may be one of the hottest, yet least understood, topics in aviation safety. What does it mean? Often when we talk about aviation safety, we’re talking about physical safety. We’re talking about transporting people or boxes from A to B without incident.
But a lack of incident isn’t the only metric for a good safety culture.
Whitesell leads Braskem’s Marcus Hook site during COVID-driven ‘live in’ … Commitment to safety
According to Whitesell, the Marcus Hook facility has a strong safety culture, with a dedication to health and process safety.
“Our safety culture has many aspects, including structured individual and team activities, management and execution of procedures, review and maintenance of our processes and safety systems, and team member participation in all activities,” she said. “To continually evolve our safety culture and dive deeper into preventive measures, we are applying the concept of ‘human reliability’ to understand what process or system may lead to an error.”
Arkansas drops COVID-19 directives, erasing months of progress in an instant
It has been a tough year, but the pandemic is much better because of the mask requirements implemented by Gov. Hutchinson in summer 2020. He provided the cover for our schools, municipalities, counties, and businesses to require masks for the safety of all Arkansans. Within hours of the Governor’s mask requirements, my local City Council of Conway passed their own requirement. Real conversations with school administrators about masks started when the Governor acted for the safety of Arkansas students. The Governor set expectations on masks and eventually the state followed.
For some it took longer. My local Conway Police Department only recently stopped posting group photos of officers without masks. They grew to understand their responsibility to lead on masks and set good examples for students wearing them all day, every day. Others in our community learned to wear masks the hard way after there was an outbreak or death in their house of worship, family gathering, school, or workplace. Private business took on the public education and outreach to encourage and eventually require mask use. The mask safety culture protected me personally after a masked worker performed maintenance activities in my home carrying the virus.
Since then, our Conway community has come together to vaccinate educators. On Friday, February 26, all Conway Public Schools staff who wanted the vaccine received their second dose. So many leaders and businesses collaborated to keep our community safe. Other leaders are helping those over 65 navigate the confusing online myChart signup and raising concerns about groups who may not be able to sign up online or get transportation. … All of that hard work is likely erased when Gov. Asa Hutchinson repealed almost all of the COVID-19 safety directives The Governor said, “We will not see a change in behavior.” We are ALREADY seeing a change in behavior. Within hours, some restaurants were back at 100% capacity with pictures on social media. Many are taking this as a signal that the pandemic is over.
Process safety specialist Ming Yang wants industry to design for resilience and incident recovery as well as safe operations cen.acs.org/safety/in…
Ming Yang has lots of experience teaching people about safety from very basic concepts. When he arrived at Nazarbayev University, in Kazakhstan, in 2017, he became the first professor to teach chemical process safety to undergraduate engineering students at the school. Before then, students had been given basic protective equipment such as goggles, but that was about the extent of their health and safety training. When Yang ventured out of the lab to do research in Kazakhstan’s growing petrochemical industry, he realized that process safety was only just emerging there, too, and he found that businesses were initially reluctant to cooperate with him. Yang moved to Delft University of Technology in June 2020 to join a new initiative to improve chemical process safety management. He is developing a software tool to continuously assess system resilience and safety. Through this work and collaborations with industry and government, Yang hopes to get people outside his field to respect safety research as they would any other scientific pursuit.
Lessons from Grenfell: Why aren’t we learning?
Gill Kernick is a Master Consultant at JMJ Associates who specialises in safety leadership and culture. As a former Grenfell resident, moving out three years before the tragedy in 2017, she has been a high-profile voice on the subject. In this episode, she chats to SHP Editor Ian Hart and IFSEC Global Editor James Moore about the pressing need to improve building safety culture and prevent low probability, high consequence events – such as Grenfell – from happening again.
Gill now lives close to Grenfell and can see the tower from her new home. She said: “Having watched the fire, I became committed to applying the learnings of major accident prevention to Grenfell and the wider housing sector. I had assumed, falsely, that Grenfell would be a catalyst for change. Over time, I’ve sadly realised this hasn’t happened hence the need for so many of us to campaign.”
“It was predictable, absolutely preventable, and we’re not learning the lessons. We’re not changing how we think about our relationship to risk in the case of buildings.”
Task force says Michigan’s dams face “grave situation” without significant investment …. Outreach and Awareness: Schedule safety awareness seminars for internal and external stakeholders to develop a dam safety culture in Michigan. Target audiences would be state agency personnel, county officials, dam owners, floodplain managers and residents, legislators, consulting firms and tribal leaders. “Aging dams, just like all infrastructure throughout Michigan, suffer from a lack of consistent investment, which must be addressed if we want to avoid future tragedies,” says Liesl Clark, director of the Michigan Department of Environment, Great Lakes, and Energy (EGLE) and a task force member.
Key lesson for California utilities from Texas: Be proactive www.kcrw.com/news/show…
… Meshkati says California utilities must be proactive when thinking about developing a robust energy plan. “The business as usual [approach] is over. Climate change is here, it’s not a hoax, it’s not fake news. And we see the effect of that. The utilities need to look at the grid, they really need to take care of their maintenance of their grid, and they need to be proactive and improve their safety culture.”
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U.S. audit report cites ‘weaknesses’ in FAA certification of Boeing 737 MAX … In December, Congress passed legislation reforming how the FAA certifies airplanes, especially the long-standing practice of delegating some certification tasks to manufacturers.
The report urges FAA to “incorporate lessons” from the accidents into “implementing a risk-based approach” in delegating oversight and said reforms “will be vital to restore confidence in FAA’s certification process and ensure the highest level of safety in future certification efforts.”
The new law boosts FAA oversight of aircraft manufacturers, requires disclosure of critical safety information and new whistleblower protections.
The legislation requires an independent review of Boeing’s safety culture. Boeing agreed to a $2.5 billion settlement with the U.S. Justice Department in January into the MAX as part of a deferred prosecution agreement, a form of corporate plea bargain
FAA said it encouraging manufacturers to engage earlier in “their development process to provide the agency a better understanding of novel features.” It is also working with other civil aviation authorities “to evaluate certification requirements for derivative aircraft, thus ensuring a consistent worldwide approach to safety and the similar evaluation and treatment of design changes.”