Methodology for the Determination of a Process Safety Culture Index and Safety Culture Maturity Level in Industries.

Aneta Kuczyńska,Dorota Siuta,Bożena Kukfisz,Piotr Tomasz Mitkowski

doi:10.3390/ijerph19052668

Abstract

A mature of safety culture is crucial to preventing and mitigating accidents, incidents, and unsafe behaviors in the process industry, so as to make it more sustainable and economically responsible. Measurement, investigation, and assessment of the safety culture using interviews, questionnaires, behavior observation, reviewing documentation, and its impact on the safety performances of an organization is complicated, challenging, and requires a commitment to all employees. The aim of this study was to propose a novel, unique semi-quantitative methodology for the determination of a total process safety culture index and parametric model of process safety culture maturity in an organization based on the Bradley model. The methodology includes a questionnaire concerning different process safety culture factors, calculation procedures, and a graphical tool. In addition, three quantitative survey indicators were proposed: indicators of direct communication, average communication time, and the applicability rate of the proposed changes by employees. A fully-developed total process safety culture index allows for identifying, hierarchizing, and benchmarking different factors of the safety culture among companies and sectors. Moreover, it will enable identifying the area of actions required to improve safety practices and elements applied to the organization analyzed. The proposed methodology was verified in a case study of one energy company with three locations in Poland and can be easily applied to different industrial fields, including logistics and warehousing, the food industry, the paper industry, security services, fire services, and environmental and other agencies.

Highlights

Introduction published maps and institutional affilThe level of safety culture in industrial organizations plays a significant role in reducing or eliminating accidents, incidents, or near misses including human, economic, and material losses
The site G reached only in that beam the highest value while in the rest of safety culture beams have mainly lowest values in comparison to other sites within the organization. It is especially surprising in view of the lowest value of the safety training beam, which is clearly at the reactive level of safety culture maturity
Safety training should not focus only on personal safety and basic operational issues and on process simulations emulating near misses or emergency cases with the use of digital twins

Summary

Introduction

Introduction published maps and institutional affilThe level of safety culture in industrial organizations plays a significant role in reducing or eliminating accidents, incidents, or near misses including human, economic, and material losses. Investigations of causes and consequences of historical events have revealed various factors influencing safety culture. Accidents in Ludwigshafen (1948) [1], Meda (Seveso, 1976) [2], and especially in Pennsylvania (1979) [3,4], Bhopal (1984) [5–7], and Toulouse (2001) [8–10] revealed the problem of lack of process knowledge and competence of operators, firefighters, and supervisors, lack of adequate operation procedures and documentation, poor monitoring of the operating conditions, and wrong plant location and layout in relation to the surroundings. Highlighted the aspect related to lack of safety knowledge concerning the identification of hazard and accident scenarios as well as lack of emergency preparedness. Identical root causes were evident in the activities of Transocean and BP in the context of the accident at iations

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