SafetyMatters

“Jim Reason defines a safety culture as consisting of constellations of practices, most importantly, concerning reporting and learning. A safety culture, he argues, is both a reporting culture and a learning culture. Where safety is an organisation’s top priority, the organisation will aim is to assemble as much relevant information as possible, circulate it, analyse it, and apply.” *

This quote comes from a paper [see cite below] we recently posted about and reminds us of our purpose in writing this blog.

We have posted about Reason’s insights into safety culture and find his work to be particularly useful.  We hesitate to exploit such insights for our own purposes but we can hardly resist noting that one of the core purposes of our SafetyMatters Blog is to share and disseminate useful thinking about safety management issues.  We wonder if nuclear operating organizations take advantage of these materials and assure their dissemination within their organizations.  Ditto for nuclear regulators and other industry organizations.  We observe the traffic to the blog and note that individuals within such organizations are regular visitors.  We hope they are not the exceptions or the only people within their organizations to have exposure to the exchange of ideas here at SafetyMatters. 

Comments are always welcome.

*  Andrew Hopkins, "Studying Organisational Cultures and their Effects on Safety," paper prepared for presentation to the International Conference on Occupational Risk Prevention, Seville, May 2006 (National Research Centre for OHS Regulation, Australian National University), p. 16.