An Integrated Approach to Human Factors and Safety

         Human factors initiatives will be more effective if they are integrated within existing company processes, and not treated as something additional or separate or shortterm.                       

Human factors initiatives have sometimes failed in the past because they have been marginalised and regarded as a temporary ‘fashion’. Much of human factors, in the context of maintenance organisations and Part-145 requirements, is common sense, professionalism, quality management, safety management – ie. what organisations should already have been doing all along.                                                                                                                   The “human factors” initiatives in the context of Part-145 are really “safety and airworthiness” initiatives, the aim being to ensure that maintenance is conducted in a way that ensures that aircraft are released to service in a safe condition.                                            The organisation should have a safety management system in place, many of the elements of which will need to take into account human factors in order to be effective. Ideally, human factors best practice should be seamlessly and invisibly integrated within existing company processes, such as training, quality management, occurrence reporting and investigation, etc.                                                                                                                Sometimes it is a good idea to re-invent an initiative under a new name if it has failed in the past, but you should be cautious about unnecessarily duplicating functions which may already exist (e.g. occurrence reporting schemes / quality discrepancy reporting / etc.).                 

 It may only be necessary to slightly modify existing processes to meet the Part-145 human factors requirements.                                                                                                                Human factors training is probably an exception to the advice given above, in that it is usually so new and different to any existing training that it warrants being treated as a separate entity, at least for initial training. Recurrent training, however, is probably better integrated within existing recurrent training. Having stated that it doesn’t matter what you call the initiatives, as long as they are done, this report will go on to refer to a “human factors programme” only in as far as it is a useful term to cover the elements which need to be established within an organisation to address human factors issues. 

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