![Snake warning sign](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7f/Snake_warning_sign.jpg)
Safety is the state of being "safe", the condition of being protected from
harm
Harm is a moral and legal concept.
Bernard Gert construes harm as any of the following:
* pain
* death
* disability
* mortality
* loss of abil ity or freedom
* loss of pleasure.
Joel Feinberg gives an account of harm as setbacks to inte ...
or other danger. Safety can also refer to
the control of recognized hazards in order to achieve an acceptable level of risk.
Meanings
![Paris Metro St Lazare](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a6/Paris_Metro_St_Lazare.jpg)
There are two slightly different meanings of ''safety''. For example, ''home safety'' may indicate a building's ability to protect against external harm events (such as weather, home invasion, etc.), or may indicate that its internal installations (such as appliances, stairs, etc.) are safe (not dangerous or harmful) for its inhabitants.
Discussions of safety often include mention of related terms.
Security" \n\n\nsecurity.txt is a proposed standard for websites' security information that is meant to allow security researchers to easily report security vulnerabilities. The standard prescribes a text file called \"security.txt\" in the well known locat ...
is such a term. With time the definitions between these two have often become interchanged, equated, and frequently appear juxtaposed in the same sentence. Readers unfortunately are left to conclude whether they comprise a redundancy. This confuses the uniqueness that should be reserved for each by itself. When seen as unique, as we intend here, each term will assume its rightful place in influencing and being influenced by the other.
''Safety is the condition of a “steady state” of an organization or place doing what it is supposed to do. “What it is supposed to do” is defined in terms of public codes and standards, associated architectural and engineering designs, corporate vision and mission statements, and operational plans and personnel policies. For any organization, place, or function, large or small, safety is a normative concept. It complies with situation-specific definitions of what is expected and acceptable.''
Using this definition, protection from a home's external threats and protection from its internal structural and equipment failures (see Meanings, above) are not two types of safety but rather two aspects of a home's steady state.
In the world of everyday affairs, not all goes as planned. Some entity's steady state is challenged. This is where security science, which is of more recent date, enters. Drawing from the definition of safety, then:
''Security is the process or means, physical or human, of delaying, preventing, and otherwise protecting against external or internal, defects, dangers, loss, criminals, and other individuals or actions that threaten, hinder or destroy an organization’s “steady state,” and deprive it of its intended purpose for being.''
Using this generic definition of safety it is possible to specify the elements of a security program.
[''Charles G. Oakes'', PhD, Blue Ember Technologies, LLC.']
Safety versus Security in Fire Protection Planning
,"''The American Institute of Architects
The American Institute of Architects (AIA) is a professional organization for architects in the United States. Headquartered in Washington, D.C., the AIA offers education, government advocacy, community redevelopment, and public outreach to su ...
: Knowledge Communities, May 2009. Retrieved on June 22, 2011.
Limitations
Safety can be limited in relation to some
guarantee
Guarantee is a legal term more comprehensive and of higher import than either warranty or "security". It most commonly designates a private transaction by means of which one person, to obtain some trust, confidence or credit for another, engages ...
or a standard of
insurance
Insurance is a means of protection from financial loss in which, in exchange for a fee, a party agrees to compensate another party in the event of a certain loss, damage, or injury. It is a form of risk management, primarily used to hedge ...
to the quality and unharmful function of an object or organization. It is used in order to ensure that the object or organization will do only what it is meant to do.
It is important to realize that safety is relative. Eliminating all
risk
In simple terms, risk is the possibility of something bad happening. Risk involves uncertainty about the effects/implications of an activity with respect to something that humans value (such as health, well-being, wealth, property or the environm ...
, if even possible, would be extremely difficult and very expensive. A safe situation is one where risks of injury or property damage are low and manageable.
When something is called safe, this usually means that it is safe within certain reasonable limits and parameters. For example, a medication may be safe, for most people, under most circumstances, if taken in a certain amount.
A choice motivated by safety may have other, unsafe consequences. For example,
frail elderly people are sometimes moved out of their homes and into hospitals or skilled nursing homes with the claim that this will improve the person's safety. The safety provided is that daily medications will be supervised, the person will not need to engage in some potentially risky activities such as climbing stairs or cooking, and if the person falls down, someone there will be able to help the person get back up. However, the end result might be decidedly unsafe, including the dangers of
transfer trauma,
hospital delirium
Delirium (also known as acute confusional state) is an organically caused decline from a previous baseline of mental function that develops over a short period of time, typically hours to days. Delirium is a syndrome encompassing disturbances in ...
,
elder abuse
Elder abuse (also called "elder mistreatment", "senior abuse", "abuse in later life", "abuse of older adults", "abuse of older women", and "abuse of older men") is "a single, or repeated act, or lack of appropriate action, occurring within any rela ...
,
hospital-acquired infection
A hospital-acquired infection, also known as a nosocomial infection (from the Greek , meaning "hospital"), is an infection that is acquired in a hospital or other health care facility. To emphasize both hospital and nonhospital settings, it is so ...
s, depression, anxiety, and even a desire to die.
Types
There is a distinction between products that meet standards, that are safe, and that merely feel safe. The highway safety community uses these terms:
Normative
Normative safety is achieved when a product or design meets applicable standards and practices for design and construction or manufacture, regardless of the product's actual safety history.
Substantive
Substantive or objective safety occurs when the real-world safety history is favorable, whether or not standards are met.
Perceived
Perceived or subjective safety refers to the users' level of comfort and perception of risk, without consideration of standards or safety history. For example,
traffic signals
Traffic lights, traffic signals, or stoplights – known also as robots in South Africa are signalling devices positioned at road intersections, pedestrian crossings, and other locations in order to control flows of traffic.
Traffic light ...
are perceived as safe, yet under some circumstances, they can increase
traffic crashes at an intersection. Traffic
roundabouts have a generally favorable safety record yet often make drivers nervous.
Low perceived safety can have costs. For example, after the
9/11 attacks
The September 11 attacks, commonly known as 9/11, were four coordinated suicide terrorist attacks carried out by al-Qaeda against the United States on Tuesday, September 11, 2001. That morning, nineteen terrorists hijacked four commerci ...
in 2001, many people chose to drive rather than fly, despite the fact that, even counting terrorist attacks, flying is safer than driving. Perceived risk discourages people from walking and bicycling for transportation, enjoyment or exercise, even though the health benefits outweigh the risk of injury.
Security
Also called social safety or public safety, security addresses the risk of harm due to intentional criminal acts such as assault, burglary or vandalism.
Because of the moral issues involved, security is of higher importance to many people than substantive safety. For example, a death due to murder is considered worse than a death in a car crash, even though in many countries, traffic deaths are more common than homicides.
Risks and responses
Safety is generally interpreted as implying a real and significant impact on risk of death, injury or damage to property. In response to perceived risks many interventions may be proposed with engineering responses and regulation being two of the most common.
Probably the most common individual response to perceived safety issues is insurance, which compensates for or provides restitution in the case of damage or loss.
System safety and reliability engineering
System safety and
reliability engineering is an engineering discipline. Continuous changes in technology, environmental regulation and public safety concerns make the analysis of complex
safety-critical
A safety-critical system (SCS) or life-critical system is a system whose failure or malfunction may result in one (or more) of the following outcomes:
* death or serious injury to people
* loss or severe damage to equipment/property
* environme ...
systems more and more demanding.
A common fallacy, for example among electrical engineers regarding structure power systems, is that safety issues can be readily deduced. In fact, safety issues have been discovered one by one, over more than a century in the case mentioned, in the work of many thousands of practitioners, and cannot be deduced by a single individual over a few decades. A knowledge of the literature, the standards and custom in a field is a critical part of safety engineering. A combination of theory and track record of practices is involved, and track record indicates some of the areas of theory that are relevant. (In the US, persons with a state license in Professional Engineering in Electrical Engineering are expected to be competent in this regard, the foregoing notwithstanding, but most electrical engineers have no need of the license for their work.)
Safety is often seen as one of a group of related disciplines: quality, reliability, availability, maintainability and safety. (Availability is sometimes not mentioned, on the principle that it is a simple function of reliability and maintainability.) These issues tend to determine the value of any work, and deficits in any of these areas are considered to result in a cost, beyond the cost of addressing the area in the first place; good management is then expected to minimize total cost.
Measures
''Safety measures'' are activities and precautions taken to improve safety, i.e. reduce risk related to human health. Common safety measures include:
*
Chemical analysis
Analytical chemistry studies and uses instruments and methods to separate, identify, and quantify matter. In practice, separation, identification or quantification may constitute the entire analysis or be combined with another method. Separati ...
*
Destructive testing In destructive testing (or destructive physical analysis, DPA) tests are carried out to the specimen's failure, in order to understand a specimen's performance or material behavior under different loads. These tests are generally much easier to car ...
of samples
*
Drug test
A drug test is a technical analysis of a biological specimen, for example urine, hair, blood, breath, sweat, or oral fluid/saliva—to determine the presence or absence of specified parent drugs or their metabolites. Major applications of dr ...
ing of employees, etc.
* Examination of activities by specialists to minimize physical stress or increase productivity
* Geological surveys to determine whether land or water sources are polluted, how firm the ground is at a potential building site, etc.
*
Government regulation
Regulation is the management of complex systems according to a set of rules and trends. In systems theory, these types of rules exist in various fields of biology and society, but the term has slightly different meanings according to context. For ...
so suppliers know what standards their product is expected to meet.
*
Industry regulation
Regulation is the management of complex systems according to a set of rules and trends. In systems theory, these types of rules exist in various fields of biology and society, but the term has slightly different meanings according to context. For ...
so suppliers know what level of quality is expected. Industry regulation is often imposed to avoid potential government regulation.
*
Instruction manual
An owner's manual (also called an instruction manual or a user guide) is an instructional book or booklet that is supplied with almost all technologically advanced consumer products such as vehicles, home appliances and computer peripherals. ...
s explaining how to use a product or perform an activity
* Instructional videos demonstrating proper use of products
*
Root cause analysis
In science and engineering, root cause analysis (RCA) is a method of problem solving used for identifying the root causes of faults or problems. It is widely used in IT operations, manufacturing, telecommunications, industrial process control ...
to identify causes of a system failure and correct deficiencies.
*
Internet safety
Internet safety or online safety or cyber safety and E-Safety is trying to be safe on the internet and is the act of maximizing a user's awareness of personal safety and security risks to private information and property associated with using the i ...
or Online Safety, is protection of the
user's safety from cyber threats or
computer crime in general.
* Periodic evaluations of employees, departments, etc.
*
Physical examination
In a physical examination, medical examination, or clinical examination, a medical practitioner examines a patient for any possible medical signs or symptoms of a medical condition. It generally consists of a series of questions about the pati ...
s to determine whether a person has a physical condition that would create a problem.
*
Process safety management is an analytical tool focused on preventing releases of highly hazardous chemicals.
* Safety margins/Safety factors. For instance, a product rated to never be required to handle more than 200 pounds might be designed to fail under at least 400 pounds, a safety factor of two. Higher numbers are used in more sensitive applications such as medical or transit safety.
* Self-imposed regulation of various types.
* Implementation of standard protocols and procedures so that activities are conducted in a known way.
* Statements of ethics by industry organizations or an individual company so its employees know what is expected of them.
*
Stress testing subjects a person or product to stresses in excess of those the person or product is designed to handle, to determining the "breaking point".
*
Training
Training is teaching, or developing in oneself or others, any skills and knowledge or fitness that relate to specific useful competencies. Training has specific goals of improving one's capability, capacity, productivity and performance. I ...
of employees, vendors, product users
* Visual examination for dangerous situations such as emergency exits blocked because they are being used as storage areas.
* Visual examination for flaws such as cracks, peeling, loose connections.
* X-ray analysis to see inside a sealed object such as a weld, a cement wall or an airplane outer skin.
Standards organizations
A number of standards organizations exist that promulgate safety standards. These may be voluntary organizations or government agencies. These agencies first define the safety standards, which they publish in the form of codes. They are also Accreditation Bodies and entitle independent
third parties such as testing and certification agencies to inspect and ensure compliance to the standards they defined. For instance, the
American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) formulated a certain number of safety standards in its
Boiler and Pressure Vessel Code (BPVC) and accredited TÜV Rheinland to provide certification services to guarantee product compliance to the defined safety regulations.
United States
American National Standards Institute
A major American
standards organization
A standards organization, standards body, standards developing organization (SDO), or standards setting organization (SSO) is an organization whose primary function is developing, coordinating, promulgating, revising, amending, reissuing, interpr ...
is the
American National Standards Institute (ANSI). Usually, members of a particular industry will voluntarily form a committee to study safety issues and propose standards. Those standards are then recommended to ANSI, which reviews and adopts them. Many government regulations require that products sold or used must comply with a particular ANSI standard.
Government agencies
Many government agencies set safety standards for matters under their jurisdiction, such as:
* the
Food and Drug Administration
The United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA or US FDA) is a List of United States federal agencies, federal agency of the United States Department of Health and Human Services, Department of Health and Human Services. The FDA is respon ...
* the
Consumer Product Safety Commission
* the
United States Environmental Protection Agency
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is an independent executive agency of the United States federal government tasked with environmental protection matters. President Richard Nixon proposed the establishment of EPA on July 9, 1970; it ...
Testing laboratories
Product safety testing, for the United States, is largely controlled by the Consumer Product Safety Commission. In addition, workplace related products come under the jurisdiction of the
Occupational Safety and Health Administration
The Occupational Safety and Health Administration'' (OSHA ) is a large regulatory agency of the United States Department of Labor that originally had federal visitorial powers to inspect and examine workplaces. Congress established the agenc ...
(OSHA), which certifies independent testing companies as Nationally Recognized Testing Laboratories (NRTL), see.
European Union
Institutions
* the
European Commission (EC)
* the
European Committee for Standardization (CEN)
* the
European Food Safety Authority (EFSA)
* the European Safety Federation (ESF)
Testing laboratories
The European Commission provides the legal framework, but the different Member States may authorize test laboratories to carry out safety testing.
Other countries
Standards institutions
*
British Standards Institution
The British Standards Institution (BSI) is the national standards body of the United Kingdom. BSI produces technical standards on a wide range of products and services and also supplies certification and standards-related services to busines ...
*
Canadian Standards Association
The CSA Group (formerly the Canadian Standards Association; CSA) is a standards organization which develops standards in 57 areas. CSA publishes standards in print and electronic form, and provides training and advisory services. CSA is composed ...
*
Deutsches Institut für Normung
' (DIN; in English, the German Institute for Standardisation Registered Association) is the German national organization for standardization and is the German ISO member body. DIN is a German Registered Association ('' e.V.'') headquartere ...
*
International Organization for Standardization
The International Organization for Standardization (ISO ) is an international standard development organization composed of representatives from the national standards organizations of member countries. Membership requirements are given in Art ...
*
Standards Australia
Standards Australia is a standards organisation established in 1922 and is recognised through a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the Australian government as the primary non-government standards development body in Australia. It is a com ...
Testing laboratories
Many countries have national organizations that have accreditation to test and/or submit test reports for safety certification. These are typically referred to as a Notified or Competent Body.
See also
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References
Further reading
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