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30 Maritime Reporter & Engineering News ? JUNE 2013 TRAINING AND EDUCATION SailSafeBC Ferries? Safety InitiativeBC Ferries cut time loss injuries in half; it reduced serious injuries by two- thirds; it slashed annual insurance claims costs by more than three-quarters. What are you waiting for? Can a vessel operator com-pletely reshape its safety culture? Can it transform communications, training, operational practices and even employee engagement? And most importantly, if an operator is able to make such sweep-ing changes, what measurable difference will it make? It turns out it can make a huge difference to almost every mean- ingful key performance indicator, as the experience at British Columbia Ferry Services Inc. (BC Ferries) demonstrates. At BC Ferries time loss injuries have been cut in half. Serious injuries have been reduced by two-thirds. Annual in- surance claims costs have been reduced by over three-quarters. And BC Ferries was able to do all this even though it was a relatively safe organization before its culture shift. This article describes SailSafe, the BC Ferries? safety initia- tive and the impressive, measurable im-provements in safety metrics that have been experienced as a result. SailSafeAbout Þ ve years ago BC Ferries em- barked on SailSafe, a major, multi- phased initiative to improve safety. In the words of Mike Corrigan, BC Ferries President and CEO, SailSafe ?reevalu-ates every aspect of BC Ferries safety culture, and empowers all employees to develop solutions.?The all-encompassing SailSafe is built on the four pillars:? Safety of People? Safety of Assets ? Safety through Procedures ? Safety through Communication But these pillars, as telling as they are, only barely begin to describe the direct and indirect goals of SailSafe. Aside from being about safety, SailSafe is about engagement, inclusivity, and co- operation. It is a joint program between union and management. It involves ev-ery division, every line of business, and it recognizes that nobody understands the job better than the people doing it. As such, it is driven by people at the top, by front-line employees, and by everyone in between. The key to the program?s success is that all BC ferries? employees have a place, all have a stake SailSafe.Phase OneSailSafe, which today is in phase three, was launched in late 2007 with the help of maritime safety and human factors experts from Force Technology and WrightWay Training. Phase one began with a series of workshops and the cre-ation of a website designed to identify learning opportunities (or ?gold dust?) to be converted into actions plans centered on the four pillars. In all, more than 400 employees contributed to the gathering of gold dust to inform these action plans.The resulting plans included items from all areas of BC Ferries operations. It included simple items like the assess-ment of dollies and oil spill equipment, as well as more complex items like the assessment of operations in areas of re-stricted visibility. It created plans around communication, employee recognition, mentoring and access to information. It addressed topics such as wet weather gear, security planning and MED record books. In all, 49 safety-related action plans - from simple to complex - were addressed in phase one. Forty-four ac-tion plans were created, documented and approved, with Þ ve of the more complex plans being carried over to phase two. There were many notable Phase 1 achievements. For example, rigorous risk assessment and local site investiga-tions processes were created and rolled out. Phase 1 also resulted in the creation of a tool called the ALERT handbook for reporting. ALERT stands for ?All Learn- ing Events Reported Today,? a program Murray Goldberg is CEO of Marine Learning Systems (www.MarineLS.com). An eLearning researcher and LMS devel- oper, his software has been used by 14 million people worldwide.Chart 1 Chart 2 MR #6 (26-33).indd 30MR #6 (26-33).indd 305/30/2013 1:00:03 PM5/30/2013 1:00:03 PM
