About the Field
Human Factors
The field of Human Factors centres on the study of people at work, and has the basic goals of increasing productivity and enhancing safety. Human Factors pivots around the processes of effective system design, and deals with areas such as personnel selection, personnel training, machine design, job design and environmental design. Human Factors professionals are employed in a wide variety of industry contexts and are responsible for the design, investigation and analysis of issues relating to the interface between humans, their work environment, and the technologies with which they work.
Human Factors is a multi-disciplinary applied science, which integrates the fields of psychology, engineering, ergonomics, management and industrial design. Human Factors is primarily concerned with the interaction between humans and the socio-technical systems with which they work. Accordingly, the broad field of Human Factors is fundamentally a science of complex systems and their management.
Safety Management Systems
Recent applications of Human Factors principles have resulted in the adoption of a systematic approach to the management of safety across a wide range of industry contexts. As we know, Safety is not an end-point, but a continuous process of monitoring performance, identifying areas that have the potential to cause harm, and implementing changes in the form of control measures to minimise risk. Accordingly, safety is a process of ongoing management, and clearly not something that will occur outside a systematic framework, except by chance.
The term Safety Management System refers to the organisational framework for managing and enhancing safety on an ongoing basis. A Safety Management System is a set of organisational processes that together provide a systematic approach to maintaining safety.