IMPROSafety: A risk-based framework to integrate occupational and process safety

Occupational Safety and Health (OSH) and process safety are traditionally separated by a fuzzy perimeter, and the need to adopt different management approaches is emphasised in the literature. However, OSH and process safety complement rather than replace each other, and their integration may achieve total safety excellence of organisations. The existing studies about this integration focus on various aspects of the risk management process and provide different types of outputs. In such a context, this paper has the objective to propose IMPROSafety (Integrated risk Management for PRocess and Occupational Safety), a risk-based framework to integrate OSH and process safety. We expand the traditional risk definition considering scenario identification, its occurrence probability, and its consequence severity, to also include other dimensions, i.e. the temporal evolution and spatial extension of the scenario, and the number of workers involved. The framework covers all the steps of the risk management process: hazard identification is performed thanks to the bow-tie chaining structure and the application of the energy theory perspective, risk estimation via quantitative analyses of the considered dimensions, risk evaluation by means of the ranking of each dimension and an overall risk level, and risk treatment through a proper safety measure identification. A case study about three real events occurred in the steel and iron industry in the last decades is used to test the IMPROSafety framework. The investigation of six scenarios highlights the most dominant event sequences and risk dimensions that should receive prioritised attention for developing effective risk reduction controls.