Message maps for Safety Barrier Awareness

All people are exposed to risks in every-day life, but they seldom experience accidents. Therefore people often believe that these accidents will never happen, and they will see the risks no more. By increasing the ability to notice risks, to see safety barriers, and to assess the safety barriers’ performance parameters continuously, it is possible to create better risk awareness of employers, managers and employees. Better risk awareness of these stakeholders will make it possible that: • Risks are acknowledged and controlled continuously; • New risks are discovered and managed; • Safety barriers are kept intact; • Safety barriers are replaced by other ones, if necessary • The quality of the safety barriers is monitored and maintained This will contribute to maintain a high level of safety and prevent accidents. Part of the pro-active accident prevention can be obtained by making people aware of the risks in a given situation, time or place, and by enabling them to observe and judge whether the relevant safety barriers are in place and in good order. This can be considered as “Situational Awareness (SA)”, which is an essential competence for at en employee can perform his/her job safely. This Situational Awareness puts a number of requirements on people, work conditions, management, learning, knowledge, experience, motivation, etc. The Dutch WORM and RAM projects led to the identification of 64 types of risks and the safety barriers and performance factors that are linked to these risks. The Danish DanWORM project has transferred this knowledge into two sets of 17 so-called “INFO-cards” or message maps, to be used by the employer and the employee, respectively. Such an INFO-card is developed for a specific group of risks and contains: • What needs to be observed, what safety barriers are in place; • What needs to be assessed, what are the performance parameters; • What requires action, depending on the deficiencies that have been found.