INTEGRATED APPROACH TO HUMAN FACTORS AND SAFETY
Integrated Approach
(a) Human factors initiatives will be more effective if they are integrated within existing
company processes, and not treated as something additional or separate or short-term. Human factors initiatives have sometimes failed in the past because they have been marginalized and regarded as a temporary ‘fashion’. Much of human factors, in the context of maintenance organizations and JAR145 requirements, are common sense, professionalism, quality management, safety management – i.e. what organizations should already have been doing all along.
(b) The “human factors” initiatives in the context of JAR145 are really “safety and airworthiness” initiatives, the aim being to ensure that maintenance is conducted in a way that ensures that aircraft are released to service in a safe condition. The organization should have a safety management system in place, many of the elements of which will need to take into account human factors in order to be effective.
(c) Ideally, human factors best practice should be seamlessly and invisibly integrated within existing company processes, such as training, quality management, occurrence reporting and investigation, etc. Sometimes it is a good idea to re-invent an initiative under a new name if it has failed in the past, but we should be cautious about unnecessarily duplicating functions which may already exist (e.g. occurrence reporting schemes / quality discrepancy reporting/ etc.). It may only be necessary to slightly modify existing processes to meet the JAR 145 human factors requirements.
(d) Human factors training is probably an exception to the advice given above, in that it is usually so new and different to any existing training that it warrants being treated as a separate entity, at least for initial training. Recurrent training, however, is probably better integrated within existing recurrent training.
This post makes a really solid point about how human factors shouldn't be treated as a temporary "fashion" or layered on as an extra task, but rather embedded directly into existing JAR 145 safety and quality processes. Managing systematic safety protocols across high-stakes environments closely mirrors the level of structure required in complex health systems, much like how specialized support services such as Autism Nursing Assignment Help in Australia assist students in mastering structured care standards. Integrating recurrent training seamlessly into existing company routines makes so much sense for long-term retention. Do you think most maintenance organisations actually achieve this seamless integration, or do many still treat human factors as a standalone checkbox exercise?
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