A network

supporting and promoting Innovation,

Research and Education

to enhance

Safety in

Complex Systems


Background


On 28th November 2019, a group of Safety and Healthcare professionals met in Manchester to explore setting up a "Community of Practice".

(The Safety Innovation and Research Network - SIREN),

to develop more effective and practical ways of imnproving safety in complex operations and systems. Their first event was held in Cardiff on February 13th 2020. This included a lecture by Professor Erik Hollnagel on "What happens when nothing happens?" and presentations on work in Manchester, Epsom and Cardiff. The group had a noticeably proactive constituency from Healthcare, who made a number of interesting and practical suggestions that were well worth following up as initial Projects.

Shortly after, plans were put on hold as the Nation went into lockdown and most of the group were catapulted into the front line of the COVID 19 crisis. Nevertheless the group kept in contact and prompted by suggestions from the wider global community, agreed that some records or “diaries” should be kept to serve as research material

(Work as Done) for more formal follow up projects which will inevitably be needed. 

The SIREN group agreed that there was interest in setting up a UK project to use UK material and contribute to this effort. An online kick off meeting was held on May 1st. 

A second progress meeting on June 2nd agreed that the community should be formally set up and be modelled on the very successful INSPIRE network.

The first three projects planned are set out below.



KWIK FRAM

Medical Students' FRAM course

Building Resilience into Pandemic Response

Areas of Interest


Human Factors in Healthcare,, Aviation, Transportation, Process Industries, Marine, Financial Risk, Management systems, Organisational Design, Security, Safety, Complex systems, Proactive safety and accident prevention, .

Resilience and reliabilty in design and operation

Quantitative and qualitative system, modelling Nonlinear interdependency Modelling, etc., etc.




The group is interested in bringing together a wide range of expertise and experience from across a full range of practical applications. Their focus is to develop and disseminate better methodologies and practices to support hard pressed risk and safety professionals facing the uncertainties and unpredictabilities of the real world. As well as encouraging the learnings and feedback from Work as Done, the objective is to recognise and respond to the strengths and weaknesses of operators and designers and insist on better and more effective resources for training, learning and  meeting the variabilities of everyday challenges   

  • SAFETY I and SAFETY II

  • Resilience in Engineering, Organisations and Healthcare

  • Functional Resonance Analysis Modelling

  • Complex Adaptive system Modelling

  • Decision Making under uncertainty
  • Human Performance

Contact Us


It is hoped that there will be interest in joining this Community by filling in the form on the contact Page. But we will also try and respond to more general enquiries by using the email address below .