Human Performance Tools Enhancing Fatality Prevention by Assuring Presence of Safeguards

Abstract

Eliminating fatalities and serious injuries amongst the workforce is of paramount importance of every Fatality Prevention policy or system. This abstract explores Best Practice of Save Your Life Actions / Start-Work Checks Fatality Prevention initiative with an ultimate objective of eliminating fatalities resulting from Human failure to safely execute work primarily by reducing Human-error rate. The initiative starts with Identifying and understanding risks of hazardous work activities of high potential consequences and safeguards to prevent or mitigate these consequences, then, developing two Human Performance tools to reduce human-error rate. The first, Save Your Life Actions, provides clarity on critical safeguards to improve ability to assure workforce knowledge and reinforce consistent execution. The second, Start-Work Checks, is a verification tool completed by a Start-Work Verifier prior to starting work and focuses on assuring that all critical Safe Guards are positively verified being in place and functioning immediately prior to work execution 100% of the time. After first year of implementation by an international oil company, these tools have not only contributed on exceeding all 2018 Workforce Safety milestones, they also contributed on marking a significant milestone, the first calendar year without a workforce fatality in its long history. The milestones of serious injuries have greatly improved as well. The monitoring, assessments and feedback of the initiative have shown enhancement in workforce's knowledge on the high potential consequence activities and critical Safeguards leading to clear reduction in human-error rate. As Fatality prevention is not a task that to be completed and left behind, continual improvement process identifies gaps and opportunities to strengthen and improve safeguards. This has clearly set the next step in this journey, that is introducing a Verification and Validation Coaching program. This program has the objective of enhancing workforce competency and confidence in application of safe work management system through on-site engagement by expert coaches with the front-line workers to closely observe work and provide feedback, anonymously, to workers. Pilots, already implemented in some upstream operations, have shown drastic improvements in both Human Performance and Safeguards Assurance measures. From a Human Performance perspective, Safety is not about eliminating incidents, but is about presence and functionality of Safeguards. People make mistakes and human-error rate is to be reduced when executing high potential consequence works by assuring and enhancing their knowledge and competency on critical safeguards. Implementation of such tools, Save Your Life Actions and Start-Work Checks followed by the Verification and Validation Coaching Program, will be highly beneficial to the industry towards Fatality Prevention.