Monthly Reflections March 2025
by Steve Norton, IOGP Health, Safety, Security & Wells Director
Monthly Reflections February 2025
Dear Colleagues,
The focus of the IOGP Safety Committee is to prevent fatalities and life-changing injuries. To support this effort, the Committee set up an expert group in 2022 to agree on a common industry definition for actual, potential, and near-miss Fatality and Permanent Impairment (FPI) injuries.
The way we prevent FPIs is not the same as the way we prevent incidents that result in less serious injuries. Learning from incidents that result in fatalities and the most severe injuries needs to be our focus, and prevention of future incidents starts with alignment on common definitions and standards and open and transparent reporting of incidents.
In March 2025, IOGP published the first set of data submitted by Members on FPIs. The data covers 2022 and 2023, and in the second year, the FPI data reported covers 100% of the work hours reported by Members (the FPI Reports are available to download from the IOGP Publications website, and for further information on FPI please visit http://www.iogp.org/fpi).
Since IOGP started collecting safety data in the mid-1980s we have seen a 90% reduction in the fatal accident rate. Expanding our definitions and reporting to include life-changing injuries is another step on our journey of continuous improvement. Thank you to the IOGP Safety Data team led by Kirsty Walker and Wendy Poore and the FPI Expert Group led by Andrea Parker for reaching the significant milestone of the first publication of FPI Member data. In the words of Peter Drucker, “what gets measured gets managed”; by measuring, sharing, and analysing these incidents, we can prevent reoccurrence.
A second event held in March I would like to highlight is the IOGP Asia Pacific Expert Group webinar on Process Safety Fundamentals (PSF). It was the second webinar of the group after their very successful Life Saving Rules focused event at the end of 2024. The webinar included an overview of why and how the PSFs were created by members of the Process Safety Subcommittee and 3 case studies from the Asia Pacific (APAC) region on the benefits and learnings from adoption and implementation of the PSFs.
The event had the highest number of registrations and attendees compared with any previous IOGP webinars and about double the numbers for the APAC Life Saving Rules webinar. About 1100 registered for the webinar and over 500 attended live and so far about 300 have watched on demand. Although the live streaming of the webinar was timed to suit the region, we had live attendees from all over the world (participants from 72 countries registered), and the on-demand feature allows future watching at a time that suits the viewer. Also significant is that since the webinar, we have seen about 350 downloads of the Process Safety Fundamentals, which will further support the future prevention of catastrophic and potentially life-altering Process Safety Events.
Clearly, there is an appetite and demand for this type of sharing and learning and the Expert Group is planning 3 more webinars in 2025. Thank you to Wido Poerwo, John Anthony Kho, Suphanan Sinthuphan, and Surapit Srisurichan from the APAC Expert Group for planning and delivering the webinar and Kieran Cunningham, Peter Bamforth, Faralian Poerdjono, and Cuong Le Man for sharing their insights and learnings on the PSFs. Also, thank you to my IOGP colleagues Ismaeel Husain, Marinara Rosa, Danny Walsh, and Tosin Oloja for their support in making the event possible.
Kind regards,
Steve
