The third component of a Safety Management System
is safety assurance.
This is about the ongoing running of a Safety Management System,
the day-to-day operation of it.
It's where an organisation looks at its own safety performance
and measures how it is performing in it.
It will include, for example, investigation of incidents.
So you've got these reports that come in,
these safety reports that raise issues.
An organisation needs to investigate and deal with these issues.
It will include, if something changes in an organisation,
does that propose a risk to an organisation?
So the management of change is an important part of safety assurance.
And it's about the closing of the loop
so that any safety issues that are raised
through safety investigations, safety reports
that are recorded and fed back
to the organisation and the persons that raised these issues
so that there is a closing of the loop.
MAN: A kind of feedback loop that must be alive,
this is the crucial thing.
It has to be a living process.
The other part of the package is the safety information system.
You know, the safety information system
is a crucial aspect to this process,
and that is finding out where the edge lies
between that which is manageable and perhaps a prudent place to be,
and that which is not.
And, again, you need to see the degree
to which people are able or feel trusting enough
to report their near misses, their errors, their blunders -
all the things that would not normally show up, for example,
in basic statistics like negative outcome data.
There are so few of those, it's very difficult to judge where you are.
You need something to navigate by,
and it's the safety information system that you navigate by.
But simply collecting the data is one thing,
then it has to be analysed, it has to be disseminated,
it has to be acted upon.
And, clearly, people reporting will not continue to report
if what they tell falls into a black hole.
There has to be feedback to the respondents,
to the reporters themselves.
So there are a lot of, if you like, structural things in both cases
that are important that you could actually audit to.
You know, do they possess these...these various features?
But, of course, the other thing which is not so easy to audit
is the sense by which it's being done.
Is it a living system? Are these people truly uneasy?
Are these people pessimists in the sense
they wake up thinking each day will be a bad day?
Those for me would be the key features.
WOMAN: Safety assurance, it's part of the SMS
that I believe will... keeps us alive.
And it's very much changing
because safety insurance includes change management, auditing,
assessing our key performance indicators.
It's sort of like the cogs in the wheel,
receiving reports and what do we actually do with that data
to see that we're actually assuring the safety of the organisation.
It's also dynamic because we've got an organisation that is moving fast,
so you have to be adaptable, and so does the Safety Management System,
to the organisation's needs.
But what's very important to understand as a small organisation,
if you have a particular type of incident,
then that is also likely to become part of an accident sequence.
And so in a small organisation,
it's really critical to get onto that early,
to know about it, to learn from it
and to do something about it, to intervene
so as to stop that sequence from becoming an accident.
Hence the very, very strong importance of SMS
in small organisations.
MAN 2: I've seen organisations
that have a mature Safety Management System very well implemented,
and they actually measure the cost of saving,
they measure how much the SMS has saved them over the reporting period,
be it monthly or quarterly.
Through events that have been reported by -
in this case it was a maintenance organisation I'm thinking of -
events that...or hazards that engineers have reported
is measured in terms of how much that has saved the organisation.
So less mature organisations often measure the cost of poor quality
in which...where mistakes are measured in a dollar term,
so warranty returns, that sort of thing.
But, like I say, the next step with a Safety Management System
is to measure how much it's actually saving you.
And it can be done and it is done.
MAN 3: While we do say that an SMS is data-driven,
and I think that that's sometimes a fairly challenging concept.
What we would say, though, is that a Safety Management System is,
at its heart, it's managing information,
it manages safety information.
So what we would look at in a small organisation
is they have more robust reactive processes.
So you're looking at more, when events happen,
that they are used to consider the resilience of the system.
Take an approach such as, "We've had this event.
"Why didn't it lead to an accident?"
You know, "What worked?"
And you look at what stood between that event and the accident,
and if it was luck, well, you need to do something about it.
You might find that there were some controls in place,
but at that point you consider how effective they were
and whether perhaps there's more that can be done.
So it's a... An event becomes the data.
So the information you're getting in your Safety Management System,
if you like, give you an opportunity
to consider the resilience of the system.
WOMAN 2: And it's self-perpetuating.
Once your team becomes responsible for areas of safety,
they actually contribute back into
the safety culture of the organisation,
and that builds a more positive culture,
a more generative culture in itself.
So you have this cycle
of a continuously living, improving, growing system,
and you can only get better from that.
Safety can only improve.
REASON: The system should be home-grown
and it should be fully integrated into the current task
so that in a year's time, once you've implemented this,
it doesn't feel like doing safety as an extra job,
it's a part of how you do your business.
"This is the way we do our business around here."