Industrial psychologists at the University of Aberdeen have just completed a two-year research study funded by thirteen oil and gas companies and contractors and the Health and Safety Executive’s Offshore Safety Division, to establish the first cross-industry safety benchmarking group of its kind.
The participating companies provided safety data for particular installations over a two-year period. The researchers were able to compare and rank the performance of each work-site on a range of measures, including safety climate, safety management practices and accident rates. The results showed that safety climate performance measures improved over the two-year period, and those installations that showed most improvement on this measure tended to also show an improvement in their accident and incident rates.
It was also possible to identify other factors contributing to better safety performance, for example through identification of good health and safety management practice. These included a high level of management commitment, attention to aspects of the operator/contractor interface, comprehensive health and safety auditing and attention to health surveillance and promotion programmes.
From their results, the research team have developed a new model of factors influencing safety which confirms the importance of communication, management commitment and supervisor competence
Project manager, Dr Kathryn Mearns said, ‘This has been an exciting project to be involved in, since we have developed a system by which we can actually measure and monitor aspects of the safety climate and culture and associate these with outcome measures such as accidents and incidents. The spirit of co-operation and the desire to disseminate information by the participating organisations has been commendable and indeed indicates a ‘Step-Change’ in the way the oil and gas industry views health and safety matters’
Dr Mearns and Mr Gordon Thom, one of the managers on the Project Steering Group Committee, presented preliminary findings from the project at the Society of Petroleum Engineers’ International Health, Safety and Environment conference in Stavanger last month.
The final report from the project will be available from Health and Safety Executive Books later this year.
Further Information:
University Press Office on telephone +44 (0)1224-273778 or email a.ramsay@admin.abdn.ac.uk.