By Marcus Brian, Principal Consultant, Universal Verification Ltd
The safety and health of visitors to our parks and the people working in them is paramount. Have we been doing everything in our power, therefore, to protect them? I don’t think so.
I have worked in the attractions industry for 24 years in a variety of safety roles, and I have been part of great teams doing excellent work to ensure the parks we worked on were safe. Yet, some industries are simply better than others at sharing information on lessons learned in safety, and amusements is not one of those industries leading the way in this regard.
Safety and health breaches do happen, often, albeit mostly incidents that do not result in serious illness or injury, and many of these are recorded through the RIDDOR (Reporting of Injuries, Diseases and Dangerous Occurrences Regulations) legislation that is familiar to anyone involved in safety in the UK. Internally, many companies operating in the attractions industry do have strong policies and procedures to drive continuous improvement in standards within their own organisation. However, the advancement of standards in safety industry wide has simply not been good enough, because of a reluctance to share from each other’s experiences.
You may be familiar with the book, Black Box Thinking, by Matthew Syed. This is a compelling account of the importance of learning from our mistakes, collectively. Syed examines how we can address our tendency to airbrush over failure by implementing open-loop systems and mindsets to collect, examine and apply learnings from failure. In aviation, for example, when the stakes are so extraordinarily high, standards of safety have advanced because of a willingness to exchange information, often contained in those ‘black boxes’, about incidents.
It is a common theme today in public discourse that mistakes or failures can be positive learning experiences. This is never more the case than in safety and particularly so in high hazard/consequence industries such as our own.
This is why I am delighted to be part of an initiative driven by ADIPS (Amusement Device Inspection Procedures Scheme) in collaboration with Universal Verification to upgrade technical bulletins for the attractions industry on safety issues.
We hope that this will further improve the communication of important safety and technical issues for the ADIPS community and in turn drive forward standards across the industry for the benefit of all stakeholders, such as controllers and operators. These bulletins will be made available to parks and included in communications to them.
Universal Verification is an expert auditing and inspections consultancy in the attractions industry and part of our role is to peer review the updates. The peer review section of the bulletins is intended to clarify what recommended action, if any, should be taken by inspection bodies (IBs) and/or controllers in relation to each bulletin. The new bulletin formats seek to ensure a better understanding as to the nature of each issue and also provide a consistent structure to the bulletins for ease of reference.
The new system of technical bulletins
The new ADIPS system will take information from a range of sources, such as NAFLIC (National Association of Leisure Industry Certification), ride manufacturers and Health and Safety Executive (HSE), and publish them in four categories:
- Safety Alert – for your immediate consideration
- Technical Bulletin – containing technical information
- Safety Bulletin – contains safety critical information
- Incident Bulletin – holds information about an incident
In a news release on the launch in July, ADIPS General Manager Carl Hagemann said: “ADIPS took the best aspects from international research and devised a system that we’re confident will give the industry clarity and ease of use. IBs will be clearly told where information comes and the specific safety issues each alert or bulletin covers. Various sources will be used, and the updates will address different needs based on the risks to owners, operators and members of the public.
“We plan to develop an area of our website in which users can search for specific content. This will help IBs when they create docs, for example. We’re delighted to be working on the updates with Universal Verification, who bring a wealth of experience and technical expertise.”
ADIPS, with the support of Universal Verification, aims to lead a drive to further enhance the sharing of safety information industry wide. If we can together create a culture that puts safety before commercial interests and is open and transparent about safety and health breaches and lessons learned, then this will be progress and it will save lives.
This article was previously published in InterPark Magazine, July-August, 2024
