For many years practitioners have debated the effectiveness of process safety management systems as opposed to integrated health and safety or otherwise even the occupational health, safety and environment systems. Clearly each type of system was developed to address a particular requirement or try to prevent a particular set of risks, or otherwise to enhance the risk management processes within an organization.
It is really for those reasons that Process Safety Management was developed initially as a standard to prevent the process safety catastrophes like the Bhopal, India incident which claimed so many lives and destroyed many others.
With developed PSM systems running for years, why are we still having major incidents in the process, oil and gas, petrochemical and manufacturing industries?
We believe that with every development of a process, plant, equipment or operation will come some certain risks. Some of these risks are significant and others less so, but regardless of the magnitude and the types of risks that can arise, almost all risks are manageable and thus almost all, other than natural calamities are controllable and thus incidents are preventable.
In essence, with experience the industry experts have continued to challenge the standards and elements and tried especially through experiential knowledge, especially after incidents to try to understand what seems to be still going wrong. Clearly, the safety culture maturity within organizations is a factor to consider. We have also with greater research from informed practitioners and human factors specialists now have a greater understanding of the importance of understanding the strategies of implementing PSM taking in to account the human element.
In this short webinar we shall try to explain the approach based more from practitioner and experiential knowledge. We steer away somewhat from the more foundational discussion on the purely technical aspects of PSM and attempt to address more practical aspects and the human factors that impact its effective implementation.
The keynote will engage in a discussion on the practical issues with the implementation and whilst it focuses on the foundational elements of PSM it will draw on the serious challenges in implementation and will illustrate briefly with various case studies as well why HSE practitioners, especially working with PSM systems must understand the Human Element.