Skills Academy, CIA target process safety management
14 Sep 2010
The National Skills Academy Process Industries (NSAPI) and the Chemical Industries Association (CIA) are to jointly tackle process safety issues in the wake of incidents at Buncefield, Texas City and the investigation of the fatal explosion and oil spillage in the Gulf of Mexico.
The link-up centres on the creation of a ’specialist skills network’ to focus on process safety management (PSM). The aim is to provide employers with the confidence that any training undertaken is high quality, based on externally verified standards and fit for purpose.
According to NSAPI, regulatory authorities will increasingly require employers in major hazard industries, including chemicals, to demonstrate organisational competence in the area of PSM. The focus, it said, will be directed particularly at board and senior management level.
The academy is now seeking expressions of interest from training providers and consultants to help the new partnership establish a specialist network that builds on established best practice in order to identify and benchmark PSM development needs.
The initiative will also involve work with industry and Cogent, the Skills Council for the Chemicals Industry, to establish national training standards for process safety management. Another goal is to ensure a modular delivery model to meet the needs of both SMEs and large national and international businesses.
In a separate move, the CIA is joining forces with HFL Risk Services to launch a benchmarking study into PSM in the high-hazard industries. The programme, which commences in November, will involve a select group of COMAH top-tier sites representative of a cross-section of the chemical industry’s activities.
The programme, said HFL, aims to investigate how the sites are currently performing against published best-practice guidelines, identify common areas of difficulty and target solutions.
