In its latest safety awareness bulletin, the Australian Maritime Safety Authority (AMSA) explores issues that come up and result in poor maintenance onboard.
According to AMSA, due to the complex nature of the maritime working environment, maintenance-related issues often result from interactions between organisational factors and latent conditions. A study involving 1026 seafarers identified that more than 20 per cent of seafarers reported working more than 69 hours per week with unpredictable working hours.
Scarce resources mean people and organisations frequently have to make a trade-off between the time and effort taken to prepare for a task and the time and effort expended doing it. Trade-offs involving shortcuts may allow the ship to be operational more quickly, but at the expense of thoroughness and safety. This is identified in phrases such as:
- “It normally works…”
- “It is good enough for now…”
- “Someone else has checked it…”
- “There is no time to do it now…”
Companies must ensure enough resources are available to encompass all maintenance tasks onboard without compromising fatigue, AMSA notes.
Risk assessment
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Consider the risks associated with a maintenance-related failure and ensure appropriate resources are available to carry out an effective maintenance schedule.
Fatigue
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Fatigue impairs alertness and the performance levels of cognitive and physiological functions, for example, decision-making, response time, and hand-eye coordination. When this coincides with other risks in the environment, incidents may occur.
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A range of strategies are available to manage the risk of fatigue.
Maintenance procedures
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Poorly designed procedures that are unclear, out of date, inaccessible, not written for the task, or difficult to follow will likely result in deviation or non-compliance.
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It is important to align procedures with the way tasks are undertaken and to involve seafarers in their development where possible.
Lack of training
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Companies need to ensure training is relevant and up to date for the tasks at hand.
Hand-over procedures
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Maintenance tasks may not finish within a single watch. Seafarers frequently accept work in progress or hand over incomplete work to an incoming watch.
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Effective and accurate transfer of information is important to avoid assumptions or misunderstandings about the status of work.
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To reduce errors, allow adequate time for the watch hand-over.
Group norms
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Norms are the unspoken rules about how work happens in a particular workplace.
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Errors may result if faced with an exception to the rule.
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Informal practices or shortcuts may be deemed acceptable if not addressed.
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If an action has succeeded in the past, there can be an expectation it will succeed again without incident.
Poor design
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If the system or equipment is incompatible with the practicalities of the task, seafarers will develop shortcuts and workaround solutions that may have unintended consequences.
