Safety Culture, A New Challenge to Human Factors Engineering for 21st Century

Objective: This paper discusses the recent challenges to human factors engineering due to the safety culture. Background: As incidents occurring in specific fields such as logistics, plant, energy and medical sectors in Korea, as well as in the public sectors including railway, road, aviation and shipping, are recently raised as social issues from the disaster dimension, those incidents are dealt with as man-made disasters in many cases. The trend regarding all accidents as man-made disasters has been expanded in the active perspective that the controllability of all incidents should be ensured in technology development, due to change from a fatal point of view regarding disasters as random occurrence of uncertainties in the past. Method: Man-made disasters are concluded as human errors, and safety culture stands out as a cause of human errors or a new cause item recently. Because safety culture, however, is a very comprehensive term, of which true nature is obscure, although many definitions of safety culture have been presented, the safety culture may make avoid the true nature and responsibility of an incident, or make the main player and subject obscure. Raising safety culture as a cause without presenting a specific countermeasure will be just a wisdom of hindsight. Results and Conclusion: This study reviews the fundamental discussions on "Is safety culture a task of human factors engineering?" and the existing approach carried out from various perspectives in order to seek an effective approach on the new task of safety culture in the human factors engineering field. This study discusses an engineering approach to meet a precondition that safety culture is not just an added factor through a review of the approaches in the proactive fields such as nuclear power and aviation, and the traditional approaches of human factors engineering. Application: This study especially defines the perspective of socio-technological system that has expanded the existing man-machine system, and discusses a systemic approach embracing various interactions, and several overriding tasks.