Topical Day on The enhancement of safety culture

Safety culture has been recognised as one of the paramount factors in guaranteeing a safe operation of complex facilities. Indeed, analysis of many events in several industries including aviation, space exploration, the chemical and nuclear industries, has shown that - besides technical factors - organisational and human factors largely contribute to the prevention of incidents and accidents. As such, it is vital that the prevention and safety policy of an organisation is not only focussing on technical solutions for risk reduction, but is also paying attention to less tangible factors such as an effective communication, trust, overall priority to safety, a questioning attitude of the workforce etc. In a world reigned by engineers and physicists it is not trivial to achieve this switch of attention. The objective of this Topical Day is to bring together a number of actors that contribute actively to the enhancement of safety culture, each with their own role and responsibility. These actors include international organisations providing guidance and tools to assess and enhance safety culture, regulators imposing programs to stimulate safety culture policies, technical safety organisations controlling and supervising nuclear operators, and of course people responsible for coordination of the safety policy within organisations.