Wrightway announce Open Course course which is accessible to self sponsored delegates or for companies who only require a few places in March 2012. To find out more about the course content, please click here.
Human Factors Training has been known for many years as Crew Resource Management (CRM). It originates from aviation, where it has been compulsory training since 1989, and has been widely used to improve the operation of flight crews and enhance safety.
This training emphasises the role of human factors in high-stress, high-risk environments, and has been defined by the UK Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) as “Using all available sources namely, information, equipment, and people to achieve safe and efficient operations”.
In practice, Human Factors training focuses on the elements of human performance that can have an effect on safety. Typically, this involves the analysis and understanding of the limitations of human performance and an appreciation of cognitive errors and how stressors such as fatigue, emergencies, and work overload contribute to the occurrence of errors with a greater potential for accidents.
The field of aviation has a substantial history of collecting and analysing safety-related data. Historically, human error has caused or contributed to over 75% of accidents. Root cause analysis by safety experts has established that errors frequently occur because crews fail to effectively manage the resources available to them, fail to verify information when uncertain about it and fail to plan for contingencies.
With greater technical reliability, automation and quality control of component systems, there is no longer an alibi for normal human fallibility so that now the human element has been identified as being the weakest link in the chain. Shipping shares a similar environmental, cultural and operational ancestry as aviation and whereas aviation in its infancy drew on the example of ships at sea, shipping is now learning from the experience of aviators by applying the same basic principles to prevent accidents at sea.
An Application Form can be found here.
