Evaluating safety-critical organizations– emphasis on the nuclear industry

Title: Evaluating safety-critical organizations – emphasis on the nuclear industry. This report concerns a study which has been conducted for the Swedish Radiation Safety Authority, SSM. The conclusions and viewpoints presented in the report are those of the author/authors and do not necessarily coincide with those of the SSM. SSM Perspective According to the Swedish Radiation Safety Authority's Regulations concerning Safety in Nuclear Facilities (SSMFS 2008:1) " the nuclear activity shall be conducted with an organization that has adequate financial and human resources and that is designed to maintain safety " (2 Chap., 7 §). SSM expects the licensees to regularly evaluate the suitability of the organization. However, an organisational evaluation can be based on many different methods. Background The regulator identified a few years ago a need for a better understanding of and a deeper knowledge on methods for evaluating safety critical organisations. There is a need for solid assessment methods in the process of management of organisational changes as well as in continuously performed assessment of organisations such as nuclear power plants. A considerable body of literature exists concerning assessment of organi-sational performance, but they lack an explicit safety focus. The object of the project was to describe and evaluate methods and approaches that have been used or would be useful for assessing organisations in safety critical domains. An important secondary objective of the research is to provide an integrative account of the rational for organisational assessment. Due to the extent of the organisational assessment types, approaches and methods, the scope of this study is limited to the methods and approaches for periodic organisational assessment. In this study, the concept of periodic organisational assessment refers to any assessment dealing with organisational issues that the organisation decides to carry out in advance of any notable incidents. Also, periodic organisational assessments are the tool that the organisation can utilize in order to concentrate on the most safety critical issues. Results The project has resulted in a deeper understanding of the development and on human and organisational factors over the last decades, and how this development influences the view on safety-critical organisations. Reasons for and common challenges of evaluating safety critical organi-SSM 2009:01 sations are discussed in the report. Since there are no easy step-by-step model on how to evaluate safety-critical organisations, the researchers propose a framework for organisational evaluations that includes psychological dimensions, organisational dimensions and social processes. The psychological …