Managing the Case for Safety Effectively
Ismail Ozer
Senior Assurance Manager
E: ismailozer@anturasconsulting.com
T: +44 7949417702
6 November 2023
In safety-critical industries such as railway, aviation, nuclear, and healthcare, managing safety case plays a crucial role in ensuring the safety and reliability of complex systems and processes. I recently attended a fascinating webinar delivered by Dr Andy Painting. Through providing 10 real-life major disasters that caused catastrophic incidents in different industries, Dr Andy Painting drove home the potential consequences of neglecting safety case management. A message that all who work in these high-risk industries could benefit from.
While we began by emphasizing the significance of safety process implementation in preventing incidents and ensuring operational safety. The discussion throughout the webinar focused on the potential alignment between engineering and health & safety. Demonstrating the crisis points during organisational growth that can lead to safety failings and being aware of hidden flaws in evidence and arguments throughout a product’s lifecycle.
The main differences between the Health and Safety (H&S) safety approach and Engineering safety approach are:
This causes challenges. The H&S safety cases could have potentially large gaps in the argument to demonstrate the evidence is suitable and sufficient. Whereas the engineering safety case should have strong arguments and use of detailed analysis such as qualitative and quantitative analysis, however there may be holes in some of the ‘human element’ areas that health and safety may cover in more detail; an interesting comparison between the two different safety cases approaches.
As a result, an interesting discussion started by asking two questions:
1. Can H&S safety approach learn from engineering?
2. Can engineering also learn from the health and safety approach?
The answer for both questions is Yes, they can.
Through the use of specific methodology, which can be applied on the control measure to make them suitable & sufficient, we can reduce all risks to acceptable levels.
This methodology is called Culture- Operations-Documentation-Administration or ‘CODA’. What makes CODA a superior methodology to some that are more widely used, is that it brings together the highly analytical aspects of both the Engineering approach and the H&S approach and blends this with human factors, making sure it takes into consideration the ‘real life’ application. The CODA methodology also includes external influences and potential upset during organizational growth. CODA is an efficient framework for examining the control measures in risk management that allows you to stress test existing control measures to ensure that they are still relevant and robust by asking questions like ‘what if manager x leaves?’. Going beyond purely technical considerations by harnessing – and quantifying – human factors ensures a far more robust and sophisticated approach to risk management. This is something our own project integration offering is committed to tackling.
Through understanding this robust safety practice implementation, assurance teams will be more well-equipped to manage safety cases confidently and contribute to a safer system environment. Remember, a strong safety case is the foundation for safe operations and the prevention of potential disasters.
Please get in touch with our Project Assurance team to discuss this topic further.