In an exclusive interview, Captain Daniel Alcantara, Chief Solutions Delivery Officer at Magellan X, speaks about the importance of worker health and safety, and how digital frameworks using wearable technology can be deployed in the oil and gas and other industries.
Oil & Gas Middle East: How can the stagnation of safety results be explained despite efforts to improve sustainability reporting for health and safety?
Alcantara: The Global Sustainability Standards Board (GSSB) issued guidelines since 2018 to develop sustainability reporting for health and safety. Despite such efforts, safety results have plateaued over the past 10 years. Worksite incidents and injuries continue to plague sectors such as the Oil and Gas industry (one of the most affected), Chemicals, Mining and Maritime. In fact, a report by the International Association of Oil and Gas Producers (IOGP) revealed that workplace injuries were about 10% higher in 2021 as compared to 2020.
Although there has been an increase in worker health and safety awareness over the years, there has been no corresponding improvement in safety results across industries or in national workplace safety results. One of the main reasons appears to be that existing safety approaches and methods have stagnated, coupled with a lack of new approaches being developed.
Incidents and accidents continue to re-occur, even within organisations that have excellent safety culture and robust safety management systems. It is clear, especially for organisations that have implemented behavioural based safety programmes, that there are insights that need to be uncovered to holistically understand the safety issues faced by workers. Environmental conditions and the manner in which workers carry out tasks are not dynamically monitored, resulting in missed opportunities to rectify and mitigate potentially dangerous situations.
Oil & Gas Middle East: What contributes to the ongoing occurrence of accidents and incidents, and why is it challenging to address the underlying causes effectively?
Alcantara: Most organisations are unable to uncover the underlying cause of accidents and tend to concentrate on direct causes. The main reason for accident recurrence is insufficient real-time information of underlying causes and pre-conditions. It is crucial to obtain realtime human reliability data to assess the cause of an accident, and subsequently execute preventative measure effectively. With Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) and software, companies can improve workers’ situational awareness and visibility and pre-empt accidents and incidents. By leveraging IIoT analytics, this will better inform the design of employee safety awareness programmes and allow for the conducting of targeted, proactive training sessions.
Oil & Gas Middle East: What specific changes are crucial for effectively managing safety in the workplace?
Alcantara: Human reliability is one of the primary factors of workplace safety. In general, human reliability refers to the likelihood of successful performance within specific timeframes and environmental conditions. Lack of human reliability information on process efficacy and work environment increases the likelihood of accidents reoccurring. The unsafe behaviour of workers is a component of human reliability. At times, workers may neglect safety protocols by taking shortcuts. It is also common for workers to not always be conscious of their surroundings. Such unsafe behaviour and hazardous working environment can exist concurrently and cause serious accidents.
Experts believe that by improving general awareness and understanding of the risks involved in human reliability, the rate of accidents can be brought down significantly. This can be achieved by leveraging IIoT and AI technology to improve visibility and situational awareness for workers involved in hazardous operations. By doing so, this can help to reduce overall frequency of accidents and incidents and improve safety results at worksites. Through data and analytics, leading indicators can help management and HSSE (Health, Safety, Security, and Environment) teams identify early trends and take proactive action to encourage positive behaviour change.
Early detection of workers’ unsafe behaviour is important to execute interventions and targeted trainings. Therefore, it is imperative that the management has safety solutions backed by digital frameworks in the worksite to minimise accidents.
Wearable technologies help organisations collect and analyse worker data, and organisations can rely on insights gained from such data to improve the work environment and processes. Utilising wearable technology as a tool to curb worksite accidents is becoming popular and has been adopted by various industries to create a safer work environment. They can minimise accidents at the worksite by helping the organisation with real-time alerts during an incident. Through wearables, organisations can track a lone worker in remote or dangerous locations. Some wearables not only prevent accidents but also assist employees in their day-to-day work.
Benefits of the Safety SmartWatch
Location Tracking
Location tracking technology in smartwatches enables supervisors to track workers’ location in near real-time at a worksite, no matter how remote it is or how hazardous the working conditions are. A human movement overview on the Dashboard and the ability to pinpoint the indicative location of each worker during an emergency will accelerate rescue operations and allow for the provision of swift medical aid.
Virtual GeoFencing
With virtual GeoFencing technology, smartwatches can alert the worker when he approaches a hazardous area. This specific feature enhances the worker’s situational awareness and can serve as the shield between a worker with a temporary lapse of concentration and a serious injury or fatality.
Workforce Optimisation / Guided Intervention
Unsafe acts are difficult to predict at a worksite. It is natural for workers who are on 9 to 12-hour shifts to get tired or stressed. This increases the tendency for such workers to get injured due to fatigue and poor concentration. Also, the monotonous nature of certain jobs may result in such workers ignoring safety protocols or behaving recklessly, causing harm to themselves and others.
As such, it is important to recognise and correct such behaviours to prevent serious accidents. Smartwatches can assist in delivering insights into worker behaviour and providing the basis for guided intervention. With these insights, supervisors can make the necessary tweaks to the deployment of their workers to achieve both safety and resource optimisation. Leveraging on IIoT with a digital safety framework can deliver workers behavioural insights and provide guided intervention.
Vitals Monitoring
It is common for oil and gas industry workers to lack real-time situational awareness on hazardous worksites. Workers may be unaware of pre-conditioned environmental risk exposures, and they may not receive contextual alerts that inform them of surrounding risk. External environmental factors and harsh working conditions may result in adverse physical and psychological effects.
There must also be a mindset shift and safety culture should be promoted in the organisation from the top to the bottom. Many employees have lost their lives due to worksite accidents and occupational illness. These fatalities and serious injuries are devastating and can have a long-term effect on employees, their families, and colleagues. Therefore, it is the responsibility of everyone in an organisation to understand the potential factors associated with worksite accidents and take preventive measures.