Options for teaching Operational Process Safety

Abstract

Over several years the IChemE Safety Centre (ISC) has been working with universities around the world to drive improvement in how process safety is taught. This has seen the ISC release guidelines on desired learning outcomes for graduate engineers. This introduced the need for operational experience, which has received some challenge from universities, as they felt academia was not an operational environment. This led to the development of some useful materials for use by universities to assist their education needs. One part of this was to develop a simplified process safety management system (PSMS) that could be applied to university laboratory activities, highlighting operational process safety requirements. The PSMS is written to fit within existing university safety management systems, which often focus on occupational health and safety. This paper will discuss the development of the PSMS including specific details of elements, and how they can be applied. This PSMS will be freely available to any university who would like to access it.