Working condition plays important role to people and society. In fact, workplace safety and occupational health is always associated with a good and clean working environment where employees are defended and hold from harm and damage. Therefore, safety and health management program is the most important factor in operations of any Vietnam oil and gas companies in term of HSE due to the dangerous working environment in oil and gas industry with high rate of accident and influence to employees’ occupational health.

Although many companies have established and developed the health, safety and environment management system to provide personal health protection and safe working environment for their employees, as well as to meet the strictly safety requirements and laws in Vietnam, international convention and standards, there are still remain many problems with regards to occupational health and safety at workplace such as the following:

1. High incident risk on offshore facilities (such as hydrocarbon release, working overside, etc.)

2. High injury/ fatality risk to worker while expose to incident.

Mr. Nguyen Quang Thuong made a study of PTSC Production Services JSC, a subsidiary of PetroVietnam Technical Services Corporation to (i) identify risks in oil and gas service company; and (ii) study the effectiveness of the safety improvement program for the company, weakness of the program and suggestion in improvement.

Conclusion

Safety improvement program has been developed in Vietnam oil and gas industry for many years. It is useful tool to mitigate accident at work site and improve safety performance. The management has been also applying the program to achieve good effect in cost control and quality control for projects. Many companies have also been successfully applying safety improvement program in their business development and HSE management. The safety improvement program is getting all management and employees into HSE responsibility; it helps project team to identify and assess hazards in their work, manage and prevent the risk of accident which can cause damage to property, injury to people and pollution to environment.

The program sets up action and implementation procedures for achieving HSE objectives and targets for the Company and projects and requirement in commitment by all staff to continuous improvement. When building a safety improvement program, the Company should consider the following:

- Legal requirement/ regulation (comply with national rules, international regulations which are enforced in the nation and HSE standards).

- HSE performance (included for office and all work sites).

Effectiveness of the program in the Company

When the program is well implemented, Company can gain the following achievement and result:

- Minimize/ prevent accident.

- All hazards/ risks are identified and well controlled. This is a major HSEMS objective in every project.

- All levels of staff are assigned with HSE roles and responsibilities, HSE performance is continuously improved in all operations and projects.

- Eliminate injury to employee by providing risk mitigation process at work site such as reporting and rectifying all unsafe conditions / unsafe actions which may lead to an accident (Unsafe Act Unsafe Condition report, Near Miss report).

- Meet legal and other HSE requirements that are applicable to the operations of the company.

- HSE performance responsibility will be assigned to all company staff especially with the management.

- HSEMS has provided HSE framework to manage all risks arising from projects and operations.

Weakness of safety improvement program in the studied Organization

- The program requires a strong and continuous commitment from the Management who must also understand clearly all the operation and adequate HSE requirement. This is sometime not achievable due to the Management being too busy for business.

- Strict safety requirement may obstruct the operation; whole work could be stopped for resolving some minor HSE issues. It may also increase cost and time for the work/ project. Therefore this conflict may cause difficulty for small organizations and projects.

- Long program and repeated daily HSE action may cause boring to the workers, then resulting negligence. HSE requirement is still complied with but the effectiveness may loss. This may even lead to more serious consequence. The Organization had recognized this weakness and has prevented bad affect by continuous improvement and refreshing programs. Some good programs were built up such as Unsafe Act/ Unsafe Condition Report, KAISEN (encourage employees to submit any improvement idea).

Recommendations

- Implementation of safety improvement program must be continuously in the Organization to indentify and mitigate risks and hazards in all projects and operations, as well as future works/ projects. The Organization should build it to become safe behavior and culture in all operation. For targeting new level of achievement, the accumulating behavioral observation data is one of the most important sources of information for continuous improvement (Thomas R. Krause, “The Behavior-Based Safety Process - Managing Involvement for an Injury-Free Culture”, Second Edition)

- The performance of safety improvement programs must be committed and involved by top management and all staff.

- The Organization must frequently organize safety training courses for its staffs to improve their knowledge and capability on risk mitigation and accident prevention when working offshore.

- To avoid serious accident which may happen at work site, the Organization shall review HSE procedures periodically with contribution from direct workers. The review shall also include the assessment of system’s effectiveness.

- Safety incentive must be maintained with adequate and in-time appreciation to employees (Thomas R. Krause, “The Behavior-Based Safety Process - Managing Involvement for an Injury-Free Culture”, Second Edition).

His thesis abstract is copied and pasted below.

Abstract

Working condition and environment are the utmost importance for people and society. All labor contracts, terms of employment are always included requirement for occupational health and safety, requested for a good working environment. Occupational health, safety and environment has the main objective of developing and maintaining workplace’s safety, health and environment (HSE) management program and employee’s work ability , also preventing accident and illness in work.

Occupational health, safety and environment should have been ensured in the planning stages of the work. In additional, risks and hazards shall be monitored continuously and necessary safeguards shall be implemented to solve and prevent working accidents, occupational illness, environment pollution and other risks.

An occupational health and safety improvement program would be essential for all companies, especially in oil and gas industry. The program provides a framework for developing management system for health, safety and environment (HSE), identifying safety problems and methods to maintain and improve HSE management system to the target of zero lost time accident, zero occupational illness, zero pollution too the environment.