Elements of Process Safety Management. Employee Participation (Part 2)

This post is the second in a series that describes some of the elements of process safety management using the fourteen categories provided by OSHA. They continue to use the same categories in their proposed update to the standard, as discussed in our book The OSHA Process Safety Standard: The 30-Year Update. This post continues the discussion to do with the Employee Participation element. The first part is here.

---

The elements of process safety have strong interaction with one another — it is not possible to meet the requirements of one of the elements without considering its effect on the others. The inter-connectedness of the elements can be illustrated by considering the development of an Emergency Response Plan, in which the following sequence of actions — involving seven of the fourteen elements — may occur (Sutton, Process Risk and Reliability Management, 2014),

• The writing of the Emergency Response Plan (element 16) requires a knowledge of which hazards have to be addressed.

• Consequently, a Hazards Analysis (element 7) is required to identify the hazards.

• In order to be able to carry out the hazards analysis, information from sources such as P&IDs and MSDS is needed. Much of this information is included in the Knowledge Management program (element 6).

• Once the Emergency Response Plan has been developed, it will be necessary to Train everyone in its use (element 12).

• The Emergency Response Plan has to be Audited on a regular basis (element 19).

• During the training process, those being trained will come up with ideas that will improve the quality of the emergency response plan. This is Workforce Involvement (element 4).

• After going through the Management of Change step (element 13) these ideas can be used to upgrade the emergency manual.