RoSPA's Approach to Safety
Our mission
Also available to download: Safety: a short RoSPA guide to core concepts (PDF 193kb)
As an organisation whose mission is to '...save lives and reduce injuries', it is very important that we are successful in communicating our general approach to safety. Safety organisations can be accused of either making safety issues far too complicated, being dangerously superficial, or taking some safety problems far too seriously and encouraging 'hypersafety', 'excessive risk aversion' and the so called 'nanny state'.
In order to give a clearer picture of some of the key understandings which inform our approach RoSPA has developed the following key points, both as a guide to outside organisations and as an aide-memoire to our own trustees, staff and our supporters. They draw on established ideas about risk analysis, perception and management that are contained in key publications such the Health and Safety Executive's 'Reducing Risks, Protecting People' (www.hse.gov.uk/risk/theory/r2p2.htm).
Key Understandings
The following understandings underpin RoSPA's approach to safety and accident prevention:
- Hazards: All human activity exposes people to hazards (things with the potential to cause harm).
- Accidents: Accidents will always happen unless appropriate action is taken consistently to prevent them.
- Risk: Accident risk can be understood as the chance that exposure to a hazard will result in harm at some specified level. (Risks can range from high probability events with low-level consequences to the converse.)
- Risk assessment: Making sound decisions about risks requires suitable and sufficient risk assessment based on adequate data and appropriate modelling.
- Justification: Hazardous activities should not be banned simply because they could lead to accidents but ideally the benefits of exposure to hazards should always outweigh the risks involved, otherwise the activity should be abandoned - even if the risks are small.
- Risk limits: Suitable limits should be set as to the maximum level of risk that can be tolerated before an activity should cease.
- Optimisation: Below this level, effort should continue to be made to reduce risks until a clear point of diminishing safety returns is reached (risk/cost optimisation). Safety decision makers, whether individual, corporate or societal, have always therefore to tread a difficult path, taking care to ensure that preventive measures are neither excessive - leading to wasted resources or opportunities (including education and recreation) nor insufficient (leading to unnecessary risk).
- Safety: 'Absolute safety' is unattainable and undesirable. Deciding if things are suitably safe therefore is a matter of informed judgement and involves ensuring that levels of risk are not intolerable and that steps continue to be taken to reduce them, at least until they can be deemed to be broadly tolerable, although in practice this is a contentious and difficult concept.
- Approaches to risk control: It is always preferable, particularly where risk levels are high, to opt for elimination (or the maximum amount of control) of hazards at source before simply requiring people to follow specific safety rules and procedures (primary safety) or providing measures to mitigate consequences (secondary safety) - or worst of all, simply ensuring that they have access to emergency and medical services (tertiary safety).
- Defence in depth: If levels of harm are likely to be severe, it is wise to opt for 'defence in depth' ('belt and braces') and not rely on a single method of control or a single safety approach which, if it failed, would lead to disastrous consequences. For high consequence risks effort should be made to select control measures and systems which will be as forgiving of error as possible, fail to a safe condition and protect especially vulnerable groups, for example, older people or young children. ('If it can happen it must not matter; if it can matter, it must not happen'.)
- Managing risk in the face of uncertainty: Where data on risk are incomplete but available evidence seems to suggest that significant harm could occur, there is a prima facie case for taking early precautionary action rather than waiting for absolute proof of risk. In this sense, those at risk should always be 'given the benefit of any scientific doubt', although interpreting available evidence appropriately in this context can present many challenges.
- Learning from prevention failures: If accidents are investigated systematically, they present unique 'windows on reality' through which vital lessons to improve safety can be learned. Accidents can only yield positive lessons for safety however if suitable investigation techniques are applied, including appropriate approaches to gathering and integrating evidence, testing hypotheses, reaching conclusions and generating recommendations.
- Understanding human and organisational factors: Experience suggests that most accidents are due in some sense to human error but such error can take many forms (slips and lapses; knowledge, skill or rule based mistakes; intentional, situational or routine violations; or failures of communication) and these can appear in various combinations. Individual and organisational errors can often interact so that latent problems such as design or system weaknesses or failures can express themselves when other defences are breached.
- Risk management and safety culture: Having the right risk control measures in place is always critical but what ultimately assures safety is having an adequate general approach to risk management underpinned by a positive safety culture. This is the case whether it is a matter of a child understanding the need for a systematic way to cross the road or a business having the right policies, people and procedures in place to manage its risks. In all areas of safety, having robust risk management systems in place (backed by positive attitudes) is the key to effective safety assurance, with such systems integrated to the greatest extent possible into all other systems which organisations or individuals may have in place for achieving other objectives. (Safety has to be part of how we manage our lives generally - not a 'bolt on extra'.)
- The case for safety: If reasonably practicable levels of safety are sacrificed in pursuit of other personal, organisational or social objectives, the latter are likely to be diminished by the effect of harms which could have been avoided. From a moral standpoint safety should always come first. From an economic standpoint investing time, money and effort in reasonably practicable measures to manage accident risks ensures efficiency, promotes sustainability and is usually preferable to simply opting to bear the human and financial costs of accidents when they occur.
- Risk and the law: People have both a duty to act responsibly to protect themselves and others and conversely a right to expect to be 'safe' when exposed to other people's activities. Wherever necessary and appropriate, this right needs to be guaranteed by law. The more control 'risk creators' have over their activities, the greater the moral (and arguably legal) obligation they should be under to protect those who may be exposed to these and/or to provide them with suitable and sufficient information so that they can make choices about risks.
- Risk perception: People's perceptions of risks are likely to be influenced not only by their estimates of the chances that harm may occur and its level of severity but by whether harms are likely to be ordinary or catastrophic, immediate or delayed or affect individuals or society generally and whether the hazards involved are: natural or man-made; familiar or unfamiliar; controllable or uncontrollable; and whether exposure to them is voluntary or involuntary or involves benefit. A further key issue in risk perception is whether people trust those who are managing risk on their behalf.
- Risk based policy making: How safe things (e.g. activities and products) need to be (and conversely, how unsafe they can be) before they become unacceptable is essentially a matter of social rather than purely technical judgement and one on which various stakeholders like risk creators, regulators and those at risk, will nearly always have differing points of view. Those responsible for developing safety decisions need always to work with all relevant stakeholders and the wider public to get the maximum amount of agreement about: how risky things really are; if and how they can be made safe; and how safe they should be made, taking into account people's safety ambitions and perceptions and their views about the time, financial and opportunity costs of achieving specific safety objectives.
Roger Bibbings
Occupational Safety Adviser
7th November 2006
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