The UK Club is a founding member of Together in Safety, which has a core objective to protect seafarers’ lives while delivering improved business efficiency and commercial effectiveness. Together in Safety is a non-regulatory industry consortium connecting the maritime sector with the common purpose of working together to improve safety performance. The Together in Safety Coalition was formed three years ago and has since developed a Framework for any shipping company as the basis for their safety management programme, and comprises three key strategic drivers. A key aspect of Together in Safety is that companies can move quickly to delivery. There is no need to spend time and incur high costs in preparing materials, with the many proven good practices free to use to deliver sustained improved safety and business performance.
The first strategic driver is leadership. Together in Safety includes modules and guidelines that will help improve leadership through developing a vision and plan, leading by example, and improving engagement and collaboration. Importantly, it also requires verification that what you think is happening is actually happening in practice. So often when a major incident occurs, the procedures have been found to be in place, but the application is found wanting.
The second is incident prevention. Together in Safety has undertaken a detailed review of shipping incidents and the conclusion is the same types of incidents keep happening. It is important to note that these are not accidents. Instead, they are repeatable events that could and should have been avoided. Together in Safety focuses on 14 categories of major incident types. For each incident type, a set of ‘Golden Safety Rules’ has been outlined, including guidelines and best practices, training and engagement tools, and checklists of areas that have highlighted major issues.
The third area is well-being and care. Together in Safety believes that ensuring wellbeing and care is fundamental to developing a healthy, happy and high-performing team of seafarers. The Together in Safety imitative includes references to deliver a high-quality wellbeing and care programme and improve seafarer mental health.
With safety incidents increasing, Together in Safety offers an opportunity to reverse this trend by every shipping company being a role model in adopting the Together in Safety programme.
The freely available materials related to ‘Together in Safety’ are available at www.togetherinsafety.info
