Occupational health and safety management system (OHSMS) and process safety management (PSM) are essential for hazardous chemical enterprises to maintain continuous operation and reduce damages. Occupational safety focuses on identification and risk controls on occupational health and safety for workers and managing environmental impacts from operating activities. Meanwhile, Process safety focuses on preventing and reducing the disasters for workers, community, and major environmental events from chemical release’s occurrence.
In this article, we briefly compare the two management systems, with reference to the requirements of ISO 45001 and the process safety management system (PSM) of the Center for Chemical Process Safety (CCPS), American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIchE) called CCPS PSM [1]
According to Kristen Hansen’s opinion, it is too difficult to find the similarity of two management systems on scope, standard structure, elements or clause, requirements, etc. because of the two following basic factors [2].
- Who is protected?
Since process safety deals with emergency situations, it protects communities – not only the workers in the facility but anyone in neighboring buildings that could be affected by a destructive event.
Occupational safety, on the other hand, is focused solely on protecting the workers themselves from illness or injury. Occupational safety incidents are far more contained and localized.
- Monitoring
As the name implies, process safety involves ensuring the good functioning of the facility’s processes. Depending on the workplace, process safety monitoring might involve regular inspection of chemical release, energy, and contaminant levels to ensure that the hazards remain properly controlled.
On the contrary, occupational safety monitoring is concerned with the features of the work environment that workers interact with directly. It might include making sure that walkways and stairwells are well maintained and inspecting machine guards to ensure that they are properly installed and in good shape.
In addition, CCPS PSM has elements that ISO 45001/ISO 14001 does not – such as Asset Integrity and Reliability, Operational Readiness and Safe Work Practices – these are the three most important elements of the PSM system. Even the elements which the two systems have the same name are essentially different.
For example, the clause on Change Management in ISO 45001 is a wide concept, very general requirements, and relatively easy to meet, whereas the Change Management element of CCPS PSM is focused on process change management, has specific and strict requirements and difficult to meet.
Thus, a chemical manufacturing enterprise that meets the requirements of health, safety, and environment management system according to ISO 45001/ISO 14001, may not meet the requirements of PSM system according to CCPS PSM.
However, the two management systems also have similar elements, such as Emergency Preparedness and Response, Subcontractor Management, Audit, etc., and the requirements of these two systems are not much different.
Thereby, a chemical manufacturing company that meets the requirements of the Health and Safety management system according to ISO 45001 and ISO 14001 got huge advantages to achieve the requirements of process safety.
20 elements of CCPS PSM include [1]:
Table 1 – 20 elements of CCPS PSM
| Pillar |
No. |
Element |
| Commit to process safety | 1 | Process Safety Culture |
| 2 | Compliance with Standards | |
| 3 | Process Safety Competency | |
| 4 | Workforce Involvement | |
| 5 | Stakeholder Outreach | |
| Understand hazards and risk | 6 | Process Knowledge Management |
| 7 | Hazard Identification and Risk Analysis | |
| Manage risk | 8 | Operating Procedures |
| 9 | Safe Work Practices | |
| 10 | Asset Integrity and Reliability | |
| 11 | Contractor Management | |
| 12 | Training and Performance Assurance | |
| 13 | Management of Change | |
| 14 | Operational Readiness | |
| 15 | Conduct of Operations | |
| 16 | Emergency Management | |
| Learn from experience | 17 | Incident Investigation |
| 18 | Measurement and Metrics | |
| 19 | Auditing | |
| 20
|
Management Review and Continuous Improvement |
Conclusion
It is difficult to compare the similarity between the requirements of health, safety and environment management system (ISO 45001 and ISO 14001) and process safety system (such as CCPS PSM), because the two systems have protected groups and monitoring to be different. However, it can be said that a company that meets the requirements of an HSEMS has the premise to meet the requirements of a process safety system.
References:
[1] CCPS, Guideline for Risk-Based Process Safety, John Wiley&Son, Inc., New Jersey, 2007
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