Lifesaving rules: implementation in action
6 February 2025
By Jack Kiely | Project HSEQ Manager | Skyborn
On the 22nd of February 2024, the project Yunlin in Taiwan held a Safety Conference and invited Senior Management and HSE Managers from all our key Contract Partners.
The goal was to agree a set of “Yunlin Project Ground Rules” that would be signed off by the parties, to supplement, rather than replace, and bind all our best practices and rules in the project. At the base of the agreed document were the following:
- the Life-saving rules from G+, with an addition raised from our near missed data: “Keep yourself and others out of the line of fire and pinch points”.
- An agreed process for dealing in a consistent way with breaches of the rules.
- A set of principles we all adhere too (e.g. foster an environment in which every person feels comfortable discussing safety concerns without fear of reprisal).
The implementation was followed monthly with all the parties involved, to allow adjustments and improvements based on actual experience. The result has been an increased transparency of unsafe behaviours and acts linked with the rules and a 33% reduction of Lost Time Cases.
As you know, the primary purpose of safety life-saving rules is protecting lives and ensuring operational integrity, by promoting a safe working environment. This can be achieved by raising awareness about high-risk hazards that could lead to serious injury or fatalities. While they have clear benefits, such as reducing accidents and fostering a positive safety culture, their effectiveness depends on proper implementation, communication, and regular review to address potential drawbacks.
At Skyborn, we are clear safety life-saving rules, can and do make a difference, but we had concerns from previous experiences in other projects:
- Diversity of rules in the workplace. Each contractor, and the developer provide a different set of rules, generating confusion in terms of which set of rules takes precedence on site, leading to unintentional non-compliance and creating uncertainty about which disciplinary consequences apply.
- Lack of coherence between safety rules and improvements. Sometimes the rules are perceived as a “cheap” replacement for operational improvements to eliminate the hazards, impacting the moral of the employees by putting the burden of preventing known risks primary on them.
- Ticking boxes exercise. Often, the life-saving rules are communicated without further follow up, turning into a static piece of advice, a “ticking boxes” exercise, rather than a genuine guidance to understanding and addressing hazards.
We addressed the challenges mentioned above by adopting an agreed set of rules that standardises the common ground to enable a solution based on the maturity of our contractors and the phase of the project.
Skyborn updated our previous life-saving rules to adopt the new industry standard from G+, that represents the cumulated knowledge of the key experts in the sector.
We know of course that rules alone, cannot offer protection against hazards. We all need to follow-up and ensure that the relevant practices and procedure are in place to back up the rules, and this cannot be reached without the buy-in from the different parties involved. This step requires customization to the actual risks of the specific scope and phase of the project.
The G+ developed a set of lifesaving rules (LSR) for the offshore wind industry to further a common safety approach and culture at a time of rapid growth and international expansion for the industry. With a dedicated LSR set, derived from the G+ incident data, the G+ hopes to:
- Provide clear and simple statements, easy to understand and follow, and attuned to the risk profile of offshore wind activities.
- Support suppliers and workers new to the industry.
- Provide a set of LSR that is easy to align with and map into contractual requirements, representing a common denominator.
- Further the safety culture of the industry.
Click here to find out more and access the full G+ LSR resource pack.