Electronic Safety Case
The key to ensuring safe operations is not only to undertake appropriate safety and risk assessment studies, but, equally importantly, to ensure that the results of these studies are communicated in a way that can be readily understood by all personnel.
Ongoing advances in technology mean that it is now easier than ever before to produce and link documents in a graphical, dynamic electronic format that will considerably enhance their utility by providing an easily and widely accessible version of a Safety Case. RMRI have developed an outline format for such an ‘E-Safety Case’, which presents information within a user-friendly, graphical, interactive browser.
Accessibility
The E-Safety Case is internet-based, so that all personnel throughout an organisation, whatever their location, can access the information, and it uses a website style ‘point and click’ navigation system, again to aid usability. Effectively, the E-Safety Case provides an easily and widely accessible ‘one stop shop’ for HSE data.
Communication
In order to aid understanding, information is presented graphically and pictorially where possible and appropriate, with further information also available by ‘drilling down’ once a basic level of understanding has been obtained, or if more detailed knowledge is required.
The presentation of an E-Safety Case is therefore less daunting than that of the traditional paper Safety Case, and is designed to promote understanding of safety issues amongst workforce personnel. It provides an ideal medium for communicating data in a clear and concise manner that both satisfies regulatory requirements and is useful to the workforce. It aims to encourage more involvement of offshore personnel in the Safety Case process and to ‘bridge’ the gap between the views of onshore and offshore personnel on safety.
