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Improving health safety and wellbeing Gaspol, Poland 6/19/2018

Gaspol and Primagas – safety as a core value

45 Gaspol and Primagas safety as a core valuecut
In 2017, we performed a Safety Climate Assessment Poland – we were very interested in how our colleagues perceived safety and what areas we could improve upon when it came to safety culture. At the same time, Lloyd’s Register had provided us with some health and safety recommendations, which we turned into concrete actions. After we implemented them, we decided to do more.

NEBOSH IGC training

For instance, we provide world-renowned NEBOSH IGC training to our safety specialists in order to build a solid base for further change. One person had already achieved a certificate, one person is waiting for their final results, and one is taking an accredited course in Polish. We are pleased to say that these initiatives have become standard at SHV Energy.


Safety Culture Indicators

We have already incorporated Safety Culture Indicators in to our Gaspol and Primagas managers’ monthly reports in order to measure the level of safety within each department. Indicators include such items as LTIR, near miss rate, unsafe acts & condition rate, incident severity rate, sickness rate, car incident rate and safety walks rate. These internal indicators allows us to benchmark between departments and continuously improve accordingly.


A new reporting system

As a consequence of our increasing safety awareness, we decided to create an interdisciplinary team to work across a series of projects as they develop a reporting system for near misses, unsafe acts and unsafe conditions. Our approach is that it is not enough to simply investigate near misses – we should proactively try to avoid them. Our priority in this regard is the creation of tight and transparent employee reporting standards, which will include classification, roles and responsibilities and timelines for closing reported issues.


Once we have developed these standards, we will start to add other rates, such as ‘issues closed in time frame’. We will also measure our performance through detailed analyses and reports of incident trends and root causes.


Cross-department safety walks

In the very near future we will have our managers implement internal and cross-department Safety Walks. These events differ from a control or an audit – they are performed in friendly atmosphere and centre around behavioural systems with basic human incentives. They will incorporate a basic check-list prepared for support, but we believe that the increasing safety awareness among our employees will allow us to do it without the list.


Annual conference: a focus on safety

Safety was the main topic of our annual conference, where we organised workshops for almost 250 Gaspol and Primagas employees. To do this properly, we cooperated with an experienced company to help us to strengthen our managers’ safety awareness and leadership. The event focused on hazard identification, operational risk assessment, PPE selecting and root cause analysis of incidents.


We have also identified some other easy-to-implement initiatives such as increasing the frequency of periodic e-learning safety trainings, more frequent and professional first aid training, and AEDs throughout our facilities with associated training.


Our goal: zero incidents

Of course, one of the most important components of this entire process is well-planned and organised communication within our organisations. We will permanently involve the cooperation of our Communication Department as we move forward. We would like to thank our project team and all of our employees for their involvement in increasing the safety level at Gaspol and Primgas. We are sure that maintaining thee high levels of knowledge, vigilance and cooperation will help us reach our goal of zero incidents.