Identifying Safety Leading Indicators for the Offshore Industry

Offshore safety includes process safety and personal safety. Safety leading indicators (LIs), or potential safety precursors, are parameters defined in the safety program pointing to potential areas for improvement, that if corrected can improve safety performance. For example, timely completion of equipment inspections can reduce the likelihood of equipment failure with associated hazards. They identify which safety metrics are more strongly associated with safety performance in a particular organization. This information can be used to improve future safety performance. This paper describes the research efforts to identify potential safety LIs that may help predict or prevent safety issues for the offshore oil and gas industry. Three relevant case studies of LIs for the offshore industry from the literature are discussed. The focus of this paper is on personal and process safety LIs in the offshore sector. Based on the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement (BSEE) safety culture factors, this paper collects and categorizes a list of potential offshore safety leading indicators.