Integrated Safety is a risk reduction program—PART 2.

Excerpt from U.S. Coast Guard Proceedings of the Marine Safety & Security Council magazine by Mr. Alan Dujenski, of Alan R. Dujenski & Associates, Inc.

An Ongoing Process
You must continually evaluate the safety program, work environment, and employee training needs. The steps should look something like this:

• ensure all personnel receive training on the integrated safety program,
• create an “action team” to monitor the program and implement updates and any corrective actions,
• tap an “audit board” made up of a port captain, port engineer, and operations manager to review the action team’s efforts and provide the CEO an annual review of the past year’s injuries, mishaps, accidents, items of concern, and any recommendations for improvement.

What Is Safety?
Safety is defined as the state or condition of freedom from danger, risk, or injury. A misconception held by many in the maritime industry is that installing safety equipment makes an environment safe. Safety is not equipment—rather, it is a state.

Why Safety Programs Fail
Management is not fully committed. If a safety program does not get full backing from all levels of management, it will never achieve its full potential. Insincere attitude makes its way down to the workers.

The program is not a product of all levels of management and crew. If one of the management staff members or a safety manager or outside third party writes up a safety plan and gives it to the workers, it generally does not incorporate the practical applications the workers encounter, or it is written in such great detail that it is impractical to refer to on a regular basis.

Training programs don’t address applicable risk. At times companies send their personnel to courses required by a regulatory agency without analyzing the requirement or researching the course.

Full article is available at http://www.uscg.mil/proceedings/winter2010-11/.

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