In a number of industries there is a sense that you cannot address everything at the same time. This has resulted in a number of organizations identifying their ‘Ten Most Wanted’ list of accidents or factors to reduce, or of safety improvements to implement, the EU-funded SAFEMODE project highlights.
Such lists are frequently revised annually, at which point items may be deleted or kept, depending on actual improvement progress or changes in priorities. For instance, the NTSB has its own list of the top 10, and the European Air Traffic Management has its own list of the top 5.
A hit-list has the benefit of focusing on key safety areas, frequently across companies and worldwide or segmentally (e.g. container ships or cruise ships). In that regard, rather than a ‘drip-feed’ approach to safety due to diluted resources split between many safety issues, there is a concentrated surge of effort which can often create a breakthrough in safety terms.
The NTSB example
The NTSB’s Most Wanted List (MWL) highlights transportation safety improvements needed now to prevent accidents, reduce injuries, and save lives in the aviation, highway, marine, rail, pipeline and hazardous materials.
For the shipping industry, the focus area is how to ‘’Improve Passenger and Fishing Vessel Safety’’
10 best practices for enhanced passenger vessel safety
NTSB recommends to passenger vessel operators and organizations the following:
- Implement safety management systems
- Develop and/or improve procedures of a mass evacuation of a ship while in port
- Perform a worst-case scenario risk assessment for all active water-based fire-suppression systems
- Review lifesaving appliance training programs
- Provide formal and recurrent training to shoreside management and senior shipboard officers
- Revise marine firefighting and job training programs
- Provide specific guidance on vessel operations when adverse conditions
- Re-evaluate emergency procedures regarding lifejackets
- Install interconnected smoke and fire detectors in all accommodation spaces
- Install a secondary means of escape into a different space than the primary exit
