Best starting point to comprehensive process safety education

Abstract

AbstractInstruction in process safety began at the Faculty of Chemical Technology, University of Pardubice, in the nineties. In 1994, a course named the Safety Engineering was formed. We aimed to equip our students with a theory that would orientate them in safety problems during their professional lives. Similar to analogous courses at other universities, the Safety Engineering course tends to follow basic steps of the quantitative risk analysis (QRA). An accident analysis and two basic notions—a system and a hazard—were selected as starting points of the course.But after a few years of experience we felt that the Safety Engineering course did not represent exactly what the majority of our students needed. Although the concept of risk analysis represents a fundamental part of any process safety theory, there is another concept that seems to be essential for professionals involved in the process industry—safety management. We started to recognize that an introduction into comprehensive process safety education should be divided into two stages. The safety management and the risk analysis should represent focal points of the first and the second stages, respectively. Two stage arrangement of the process safety course seems to suit needs of our students better than the previous scheme. After the idea of division of the process safety course had arisen, a new starting point for the comprehensive safety education had to be found. An old approach of Kletz's on “learning from accidents” showed itself to be suitable to fulfill this role most naturally. © 2007 American Institute of Chemical Engineers Process Saf Prog 26:195–202, 2007