Safety Management System - An Overview

Upper management involvement is essential to an effective investigation program. This involvement is through the planning and programming processes; through policy, standards, budget, organization, training and measurement. An effective, organized program provides timely feedback on perturbations of the business activity. This integrates investigation with the other functions of management to enhance the efficiency and economy as well as the safety of business operations. A critical point is acceptance of the premise that accidents are the results of management errors. Until this is realized, investigation is confined to treating symptoms and not causes. Each and every accident goes back beyond the substandard acts and conditions, the violations of rules, to basic deficiencies in the complete system - the people, equipment, materials and environment. The system is built by management and can only be corrected by identifying the management error.

Investigative parameters - what accidents are investigated and to what extent - are established
through policy and classification systems. The classification system formalizes planning into defined responses for various accidents. The categories are established by rating systems, subjective or objective, which reflect upper management interests and concerns.

Finally, measurement systems provide evaluation of the feedback and are the place of the safety
professional in the investigative process. Evaluation of accident reports is vital, not only to apply
correction of substandard performance, but also to provide correction of substandard investigations

A management system includes subjects or "elements" that together will bring the desired results. These elements are areas of management activity that are considered vital to bring about the success of the overall management system. One of those elements is related to learning from accidents: the "Accident Management System" or simply labelled "Accident Investigation".

N.B. On this website I will be more specific in relation to accident investigation, however, the principles I discuss will also apply to other elements of the safety management system or to elements of a different management system set up for another purpose.

It is important to realize that the desired results of the management system as a whole can best be obtained if the each separate "element" contributes with its own results. While the objective of the overall safety system would probably be: "no accidents", the objectives of "accident investigation", one of the composing elements, should be more specific to the element. For example: "to obtain good quality investigations" such that the organization could indeed be "learning from accidents". While such a statement is rather vague, the objective good be more factual by using a simple professional judgement basis as provided under "Accident Report Rating".

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