This particular project had a lot of operational designations for us to substantiate from a human factors point of view. An operation designation is any activity that the operator does to help ensure radiological safety. So, traditionally we’d analyse these on an individual level. We’ll carry out things like Performance Shaping Factors (PSFs) analysis where they look at the different factors that could influence the task. Or Human Error Analysis (HEA) where we look at the different errors associated with the task.
In this case it could be hundreds of designations, we couldn’t take that approach without it becoming very costly and time consuming. So, what we did is we took a grouping approach. We work with operations and safety case and other stakeholders to identify groups we could put these operational designations in. For example, for respiratory protective equipment there’s lots of operational designations related to donning and doffing of respiratory equipment throughout the facility. We grouped those together and then reviewed these from an human factors point of view in the same way we would an individual task. So, we carried out those same analysis that we spoke about.
Essentially at the end we were able to take a very efficient approach which led to time and cost savings. But also we did a nice concise report at the end of it that ran to tens of pages as opposed to hundreds of pages, which the client was very happy with because it was quite usable and fit nicely within the overall safety case for the facility.
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