Papers by Maureen Hassall
A drive to diversify water supply sources and promote sustainable and resilient urban development... more A drive to diversify water supply sources and promote sustainable and resilient urban development has led to the implementation of recycled water schemes in residential developments of Australia. While a portion of these schemes have been successfully implemented, a significant number have been delayed in commissioning or decommissioned well before the end of their design life. Research suggests that risk assessments have primarily focussed on the environmental and public health risks associated with recycled water, with few stakeholders conducting an integrative and comprehensive assessment of risk factors that could adversely impact the viability and sustainability of these schemes. Through in-depth interviews with water industry practitioners, six limiting factors of current risk assessment and management practices were identified comprising poorly defined project objectives; a focus on hard, quantifiable risks with less consideration to soft, qualitative risks; independent assessment of risk factors; a siloed approach to risk assessment and management; minimal consideration to the time frame and context of recycled water schemes and the need to diversify management measures from that traditionally adopted. A framework to address the limitations in risk assessment and management practices for recycled water schemes, and potentially for a broad array of sustainable and resilient urban initiatives, is presented in this paper.
Contemporary research indicates increasing rapid and significant changes impacting sociotechnical... more Contemporary research indicates increasing rapid and significant changes impacting sociotechnical work systems will require different approaches to effectively manage risks. Future research activities, research contexts and research personnel may be quite different from past and current practices. How people interact with technology and their work environments will change rapidly and it will be essential to have risk management approaches that can effectively adapt to address future risks. Research suggests traditional risk management approaches may not necessarily help researchers identify contemporary and emergent risks. However, there seems to be a lack of research done to develop approaches that help manage future risks in research and development environments. Therefore, to help ensure research worker safety performance into the future, there is a need to explore various sociotechnical elements that impact risk identification, assessment, and management. This paper comprises research conducted as part of a PhD program to develop an approach for researchers to use to identify, predict, assess, and manage risks that may arise from their work with future technology without stifling technology innovativeness. The presentation will discuss a study conducted to identify the range of possible risks that may impact researchers in the future. Participants from different research contexts were asked, via a survey, to identify what things might threaten health and safety of workers in their area of research in the next 5 to 10 years. The results from the survey were combined with results from a review of literature to reveal both continuing and new risks that have the potential to impact workers health and safety in the future. The presentation will conclude with a discussion of the next steps in the research that will be conducted to develop and empirically test approaches intended to help front-line workers more effectively identify, assess and manage foreseeable and emergent risks without stifling innovativeness.
Proceedings of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society ... Annual Meeting, Sep 1, 2011
Journal of Cognitive Engineering and Decision Making, Jun 1, 2016
To improve safety, work systems need to be designed that help humans successfully manage expected... more To improve safety, work systems need to be designed that help humans successfully manage expected and unexpected situations. A resilience-based human factors method called strategies analysis for enhancing resilience (SAfER) has been developed to help practitioners identify ways to create systems that let humans more effectively control the range of different operating situations they may face. The SAfER method covers the identification of (a) critical system priorities that need to be preserved in order to sustain safe operations; (b) the range of decisions, actions, and strategies that humans might use to try to control different operating scenarios; and (c) design changes that help to promote actions that preserve safe operations and prevent or tolerate actions that might result in adverse outcomes. This paper describes the SAfER analysis conducted on an industrial crane-lift incident, and it compares the results from the SAfER analysis with those from a traditional incident investigation process. The findings from the comparison suggest that the SAfER method helps analysts identify and generate additional and potentially useful information on how the system design might be changed to improve crane-lift safety.
Journal of Loss Prevention in The Process Industries, Sep 1, 2021
Abstract Many incident reports and much research literature have concluded that incident rates in... more Abstract Many incident reports and much research literature have concluded that incident rates in high-hazard industries can be reduced by enhancing the knowledge and information sources available to workers. However, a sparsity of published research reporting workers' perspectives on the value of information and knowledge sources in different operational situations potentially limits the effectiveness of interventions aimed at improving human responses to process safety performance. In response, this work seeks to understand how frontline oil and gas industry workers, responsible for managing process safety and other risks in their hazardous workplaces, rely on their own knowledge, the knowledge of others and information provided to manage different operating scenarios. A set of open and closed-ended survey questions were distributed to workers at several upstream and downstream oil and gas companies. Statistical analysis of 133 responses revealed interesting insights relating to participants’ experience levels, decision making practices and perceptions on the importance of various information and knowledge sources in different operating circumstances. The data revealed differences in the sources of knowledge relied upon by experienced and less experienced workers. Experienced workers rely on their own knowledge in both routine and potentially high-impact scenarios. Less experienced workers also rely on their own knowledge for routine decisions however they reported seeking out external knowledge and information in potentially high-impact scenarios. The data suggests that interventions to improve safety by enhancing the availability of knowledge and information sources are less likely to affect experienced workers and alternate strategies might be needed. However, such interventions might be effective if they are focused on supporting newer workers.
Education for Chemical Engineers, Jul 1, 2020
This is a PDF file of an article that has undergone enhancements after acceptance, such as the ad... more This is a PDF file of an article that has undergone enhancements after acceptance, such as the addition of a cover page and metadata, and formatting for readability, but it is not yet the definitive version of record. This version will undergo additional copyediting, typesetting and review before it is published in its final form, but we are providing this version to give early visibility of the article. Please note that, during the production process, errors may be discovered which could affect the content, and all legal disclaimers that apply to the journal pertain.
CRC Press eBooks, Nov 17, 2022
Proceedings of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society ... Annual Meeting, Sep 1, 2016
Serious incidents continue to occur in industry. Irrespective of industry type and work task the ... more Serious incidents continue to occur in industry. Irrespective of industry type and work task the same types of incidents are continuing to repeat themselves and the same conclusions drawn regards the role of the human operator in incident development. Although substantial amounts of research has been undertaken to understand the human contribution to organizational incidents little research has been done to explore whether or how these discoveries have been implemented in the field. To address this gap we surveyed industry practitioners to determine their perspectives on the use of human and organizational factors analysis as part of current incident investigation processes. Results showed that the majority of practitioners indicated that human and organizational factors analysis was already being implemented to some degree in current incident investigation processes. However they also indicated that threats existed to successful identification of human and organizational factors issues and the subsequent implementation of recommendations to address them.
Journal of Cleaner Production, Feb 1, 2022
CRC Press eBooks, Nov 17, 2022
Sustainability
There seems to be no agreed taxonomy for climate-related risks. The information in firms’ climate... more There seems to be no agreed taxonomy for climate-related risks. The information in firms’ climate risk disclosures represents a new resource for identifying the priorities and strategies of Australian companies’ management of climate risk. This research surveys 839 companies listed on the Australian Stock Exchange for the presence of climate risk disclosures, identifying 201 disclosures on climate risk. The types of climate risks and the risk management strategies were extracted and evaluated using machine learning. The analysis revealed that Australian firms are focused on acute physical climate risks, followed by market and regulatory risks. The predominant management strategy for these risks was to use a risk reduction approach, rather than avoiding or transferring risk. The analysis showed that key Australian industry sectors, such as materials, banking, insurance, and energy are focusing on different mixtures of risk types, but they are all primarily managing risks through risk...
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Papers by Maureen Hassall