Living HRA: Building new communities of practice for proactive safety management

In order to improve human reliability assessment (HRA) methods, we need to understand the role of HRA in a safety assessment process as applied in the industry today. The traditional focus on HRA as provider of human error probability numbers for probabilistic risk assessment obscures the diversity of HRA users and uses that can be identified when HRA is analyzed in its organizational context. Once such an organizational perspective is adopted, opportunities for new communities of practice emerge, linking HRA with other human factors and safety-related activities (event review, training, design etc) into a continuous safety management / safety monitoring process. This paper presents results from an interview study at a nuclear power plant in Europe. It documents current practices, constraints and problems in the application of HRA. It also identifies opportunities for improved use of plant-specific operational information and makes suggestions on how other practitioners at the plant can capitalize on the results, knowledge and experience of HRA analysts. Implications for the development of second-generation HRA methods are discussed.