Safety culture - Is it important?

A strong and improving safety culture provides the foundation for building long term success for a company. It is a cultural change for most organizations and requires years not months to achieve. Short term successes are typically achieved and the smart companies build upon and communicate those successes. For long term success, these companies never deviate or become complacent about maintaining a strong safety culture. There are several lessons learned from the nuclear industry that support the need to maintain a strong safety culture: 1)prevention of human errors costs less than dealing with the consequences 2)poorly designed processes cause the majority of human errors 3)quality supervision is a powerful tool in human error reduction 4)performance monitoring/trending and technology based root cause analysis are essential to human error reduction 5)human errors caused by misjudgment need special attention 6)procedural non-compliance needs a focused solution based on organizational psychology 7)the benefits of a well designed accountability system are very significant 8)knowledge and skills, more rules, are the last line of defense against problems. (authors)