Help is Needed to Define Safety

It is hard to determine if you are safer if you are not measuring safety, and it is even harder to measure safety if you haven’t yet defined what that is.

How can we improve safety if we are unable to describe what safety is? There are numerous definitions of terms used when reporting undesirable events, including non-conformity, near miss, injury, accident, incident, grounding, and hazardous occurrence to name a few. If your goal is zero incidents, what does that mean: zero lost time injuries; zero spills outside of containment; zero customer service complaints; zero “not on time” arrivals or departures?

Over the years, the maritime industry has accumulated a broad spectrum of non-standardized safety definitions, which makes tracking, trending and analyzing data very challenging to help measure and improve safety performance overall. If “incidents” means one thing to one person or organization and another to someone else, how do we move forward collectively to achieve zero incidents? 

In order for data to be meaningful and to help achieve the desired results, it needs to be standardized. Take “slips, trips and falls” reporting and data collection for example. What are you actually measuring when you ask for slip, trip and fall information? Slips and falls, slips and almost falls, slips and breaks an arm, slips and goes overboard, trips, but doesn’t fall? Every time you change or alter the definition, the data changes. For those whose job it is to collect data, I am sure you are nodding your heads up and down right now.

There is a solution to this, but your input is essential in helping to make it happen. Over the past few years, the Ship Operations Cooperative Program (SOCP) members with support from the U.S. Maritime Administration (MARAD) have worked collectively with the American Bureau of Shipping (ABS) and Lamar University as well as other stakeholders to help improve safety through tracking, trending and analyzing injury and anonymous near miss data reporting. What has been discovered along the way is a hodgepodge of terms and mishmash of definitions. As any good data gatherer can tell you, this type of data input is not going to yield a successful output. Therefore, with continued support of the SOCP members and MARAD, ABS and Lamar University are standardizing the terms and definitions through the American Society for Testing and Materials (ASTM) standardization process and need your help to provide feedback on two initial draft standards, one for injuries and the other for near misses.

According to Mr. Todd Ripley, with MARAD and Chairman of the ASTM International’s Committee for Ships and Marine Technology (F25), “The purpose of this project is to draft safety reporting standards to eventually serve the maritime industry and company safety professionals for measuring and improving safety. These standards would not take the place of current safety reporting requirements, but would support them and promote consistency for maritime safety data collection, reporting and benchmarking. It is the intent that these standards in their final version will: (1) support and promote consistent nomenclature characterizing accidents, causal factors, and means of remediation, and common means to normalize incident data (2) afford the opportunity for industry benchmarking, within and among similar organizations, and (3) help to solve a large problem for smaller companies who often lack expertise and experience suitable to consistently conduct incident reporting, recording, and investigations.” 

If you want to help with this effort and provide your input to the draft documents, please contact Dr. Brian Craig, Lamar University via email at [email protected] and copy Dr. Kevin McSweeney, ABS at [email protected]. Your input needs to be received by November 6, 2015. Once the input is collected, reviewed, considered and incorporated, a revised updated version of the draft documents will be circulated to those participating for further review and comment.  Brian can be reached at 409-880-8804 if you have questions or comments that you would like to discuss with him directly.

Thank you in advance for helping with this effort to further define and enhance safety in the maritime industry.