ENSI Approach to Oversight of Safety Culture

Claudia Humbel Haag presented developments in ENSI approach to safety culture oversight. ENSI has developed a definition/understanding of Safety Culture and a concept of how to perform oversight of Safety Culture. ENSI defines safety culture in the following way: Safety Culture comprises the behaviour, world views (in the sense of conceptualisations of reality and explanation models), values (in the sense of aims and evaluation scales), and features of the physical environment (specifically, the nuclear power plant and the documents used) which are shared by many members of an organization, in as much as these are of significance to nuclear safety. A model of the accessibility of safety culture was presented ranging from the observable (external aspects of safety culture), to aspects that are accessible by asking questions, through to aspects that are not accessible (internal part of safety culture). ENSI considers observable aspects through the existing systematic safety assessment compliance program. Aspects that are observable by asking questions will be addressed by additional oversight activities outside the systematic assessment program. Aspects that are not accessible are addressed by helping the licensee to re-think its safety culture through proactive discussions on safety culture. Reports are issued to the licensee on assumptions and observations identified through the discussions. The conclusions of the presentation emphasised the importance of basing any interventions in this area on a solid understanding of the concept of safety culture. ENSI safety culture oversight principles were also described. These include licensee responsibility for safety, and the need for the regulator to critically review their own activities to ensure a positive influence on the licensee