The holiday season is upon us. It’s the season for spending time with family, sharing our presence as presents and giving thoughtful gifts from wish lists to show we care. So, what’s on the wish list of the process safety professionals in your life? It’s one we hear it all the time: for everyone to get home safe.
Process Safety Management (PSM) folks are hard-working people and the only way to know they’re doing a good job is if nothing happens. It’s a bit of a thankless role sometimes: if an incident occurs they’re first in the hot seat, and if nothing happens people start to wonder if they’re needed at all!
All I Want for Christmas Is…For Everyone to Get Home Safely
Around the globe, the criticality of process safety awareness is growing and universities are making it a core part of engineering programs. The Texas A&M/ Mary Kay O’Connor Process Safety Center, known affectionately as the ‘Mecca’ of PSM and proudly bearing the namesake of one of the lives lost at the tragic incident in Pasadena, TX 1989, leads the way as the first university to have a formal process safety program. More institutions including Perdue University in Indiana are getting involved. Industry groups, like the American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE) which formed the Center for Chemical Process Safety, have brought together experts from around the world promoting best practices and providing educational materials and events.
In Canada, the University of Alberta developed Canada’s first university-level process safety course, through the David & Joan Lynch School of Engineering Safety & Risk Management, which is now mandatory for all Chem Eng students at the university to include this course as part of their curriculum.
Companies are taking more interest – and senior executives are increasingly more engaged – in supporting good risk management programs, as more and more people learn about the critical importance of elevating process safety, risk management, and loss prevention. Together, using the data, tools and innovative technology available teams are searching for ways to make work as safe as possible for everyone.
What Would a PSM Expert Have on Their Holiday Wish List?
- Executive Commitment – there’s nothing like senior leaders having awareness and supporting process safety initiatives in both words and actions
- Employee engagement – ask your company PSM team questions, show interest whether you’re a unit operator or a process engineer process safety affects everyone.
- Funding – nothing gets results like funding a strong process safety program. Prevent incidents, keep your people safe and you’ll reap the reward of improved uptime, fewer upsets and a stronger reputation in financial markets
- Better risk communication tools and technology to share critical safety data with more people in their companies
- More sharing of data and learnings across industry about best safety practices
Risk Management is Serious Business
This holiday season as you go about your days enjoying the benefits of all the products that have been produced at the risk of those who work in high hazard industries; give a though to the hard working men and women championing process safety.
They’re protecting the workers, the environment where they operate and the assets owned by the shareholders of those many fine safety conscious teams. So say a big thank you to the PSM team, they’re doing their best to ensure it’s a happy holiday for all the families of those workers.
Let’s all work to support high hazard workplace safety. Let us know what that looks like for you and leave a comment with your thoughts below or connect with us to find out how Risk Alive® can help you!Â
