82 Sandra Lovell is a Chartered Occupational Psychologist at ERM, UK and has worked across numerous high hazard industries including mining, manufacturing and oil & gas. She specialises in organisational culture and safety, human factors in system design, performance assessment & development in safety critical tasks and training systems. She has trained leaders in safety and in assessing compet...

ith nearly 100,000 chemicals on the global market and at least a thousand more added every year, the potential for toxic exposures is rising. Exposure may happen quickly, as in a chemical accident, or slowly, through low levels over a long period of time. While all populations are vulnerable, those most affected are the poor and illiterate citizens of developing countries that have little or no...

Process safety analysis is necessary for analyzing and assessing in detail the inherent hazards in chemical processes. We have developed a tool (called PHASuite) to assist experts conducting process safety analysis. PHA is knowledge intensive, and the analysis capacity and quality of PHASuite depend exclusively on the quality of domain knowledge. It is, however, impossible and impractical to en...

The humidifier disinfectant disaster (HDD) was not a simple poisoning accident by biocides, but a singular disaster in history created by chemicals in household products. This disaster was a result of the failure of a system for the management of chemical and product safety. Since the management authority for chemical usage safety is different from those for chemical safety in products, many bl...

The exponential growth of the Internet of Things and the global popularity and remarkable decline in cost of the mobile phone is driving the digital transformation of medical practice. The rapidly maturing digital, non-medical world of mobile (wireless) devices, cloud computing and social networking is coalescing with the emerging digital medical world of omics data, biosensors and advanced ima...

Occupational health concerns with the two-way relationship between work and health. Previously, occupational health and safety was treated as a single subject by industries. However, most often higher attention was paid on process safety rather than occupational health aspect. Unlike process safety that primarily deals with major and short-term events, occupational health concerns with continuo...

The recent publication by the U.S. Chemical Safety Board (CSB) concerning its findings on the Concept Sciences Inc. (CSI) incident involving hydroxylamine (HA) has raised issues with regard to safe production of HA. This CSI incident was followed by another incident that destroyed the Nissin Chemical HA plant in Japan, and today BASF is the sole commercial producer of HA. HA is an important sol...

This article provides a systematic framework for the analysis and improvement of near-miss programs in the chemical process industries. Near-miss programs improve corporate environmental, health, and safety (EHS) performance through the identification and management of near misses. Based on more than 100 interviews at 20 chemical and pharmaceutical facilities, a seven-stage framework has been d...