A review of safety management systems in offshore oil and gas organisations

Although there are a number of standards and guidelines for safety management systems (SMSs) available, there is a lack of publicly available research data on the effectiveness of SMSs and the components in high hazard industries such as offshore oil and gas organisations. Additionally, there is little research on comparing the relevance of SMS components to the effectiveness of safety management in actual workplaces or by comparing breakdowns in SMS in actual high consequence incidents. This paper reviews the structure and component of an array of national and international SMS standards as well as industry codes/ practices and recommended guidelines in this regard. A comparison of SMS components is presented with a selected sample of key operators from the offshore oil and gas industry. Finally, potential linkages are discussed with respect to contributory root causes of some recent incidents in the industry