Iran Occupational Health

Abstract
Background and aims: Managing the emergency situation is a big challenge for the process industries. Training has a substantial role the quality and success of the emergency response. Disasters regularly have devastating effects on the world's populations. The potential of high human casualties, heavy financial burden, environmental damage, and negative impacts on corporate reputation, highlights the importance of proper emergency management. Investigation of major industrial accidents demonstrates that organization’s unpreparedness for emergency conditions can noticeably increase consequences of an accident. Emergency management means establishing, training, and practicing plans and programs that reduce the vulnerability of the organizations to critical conditions, and help organizations to overcome these conditions more effectively with minimal costs and losses. Effective emergency management requires proper planning to increase the software and hardware readiness of the organization for critical situations. Planning processes, theoretical and practical training (maneuvers) are of key importance in software preparation. Each of the three processes of planning, training, and practicing (maneuvering) has a decisive role in the success or failure of an emergency response. In the planning phase, the most likely event scenarios should be identified, their consequences evaluated and accordingly, guidelines and procedures should be developed to deal with emergencies. In the later phases, these programs are trained and strive to enhance the preparedness of individuals and operation units for dealing with emergencies by holding maneuvers. It should be noted that practicing maneuvers are also a form of training that attempt to convey and understand concepts more effectively by simulating real emergencies. The review of past events indicates that the lack of proper educational system or ineffective training is one of the major reasons for people’s inability to respond appropriately to emergencies. For example, analysis of the explosion incident at the Texaco refinery in 1994 showed that inadequate training of staff to prepare for emergencies was one of the main causes of the accident. Lack of proper and adequate knowledge of the accident and consequently failure of the response team to act in the accident can aggravate the accident and result in life and financial losses. The quality of an organization’s response to emergencies highly depends on the quality and quantity of pre-programmed and implemented training. If emergency response training programs are presented properly, responding personnel will be able to collaborate effectively and will be ensured of response team’s health. Research shows that courses tailored to individual’s responsibilities have a major impact on promoting their preparedness for confronting emergencies. Also understanding and ability to implement a skill is highly dependent on pre-provided training. The roles and responsibilities of different levels of staffs, in emergencies, vary from each other and partly have a distinct nature. Therefore, people at different levels of an organization need different training at emergency management. The issue of crisis management training and how to deal with relevant emergencies is of particular importance in the processed industries and especially in the petrochemical industry that dealt with toxic substances. One of the standards that systematically addresses the essential training required by emergency response teams is the HAZWOPER standard. Given the above, it should be further emphasized the key importance of systematic training in the emergency readiness phase. Despite the importance of this issue, few research studies have been conducted to determine the educational needs of emergency response groups. In this study, it is attempted to identify the operational criticality of each scenario by identifying and analyzing emergency scenarios and extracted its training needs and compared it to the HAZWOPER standard. This study aims at determining the training needs of the emergency response team using task criticality analysis and comparing the determined requirements to the HAZWOPER standard.
Methods: the present study was conducted in Bouali Sina Petrochemical co. in 2018 as a cross sectional research. This study aimed to determine the training needs of the emergency response team using Swezey Task Criticality Analysis. First, a team of eight experts from the company’s safety and crisis management was formed and four final scenarios were selected by examining the list of pre-identified emergency scenarios. The criteria for selecting these scenarios were considered as probability of emergence, probable consequences, and the level of readiness of the organization to deal with these scenarios. Selected scenarios also attempted to cover a wide range of different kinds of possible events. Then, for each of the final scenarios selected, the tasks of the response team members were identified using the Hierarchical Task Analysis (HTA) technique. HTA is introduced by Kirwan as the most powerful task analysis technique that is one of the applications of this technique to determine the training needs needed to perform a task. After performing the HTA, criticality analysis was performed for the scenario response tasks. According to the Swezey Criticality Analysis method, tasks are divided into three levels of low, medium and high criticality. Tasks with low criticality level are tasks in which the occurrence of errors or improper performance has a negligible negative effect on successful mission accomplishment. Tasks with medium criticality level are tasks in which the occurrence of errors or improper performance has moderate consequences and may jeopardize the successful execution of the mission. Tasks with High criticality level are tasks that any errors or improper performance to perform will certainly lead to the failure of the entire mission. After training the Criticality Analysis method, the information of the hierarchical analysis of the Emergency Response Tasks graphically was provided to 77 personnel of the Emergency Response Team. The study group was selected based on the census method and from all the emergency response personnel team in three shifts. The group was asked to determine the criticality of the analyzed tasks at three levels of low, medium, and high through using Swezey criticality analysis method. After collecting the opinions of the study group and averaging the given scores, the criticality status of each task was analyzed. Then, according to the results, the sub-tasks were identified with high criticality level. After this stage, the most critical tasks were classified. In other words, the number of critical tasks for each emergency post was determined. Next, the list of high-critical tasks along with the job titles for those tasks were made available to previous experts and specialist and they were asked to list the essential training needs to perform each critical task safely and effectively. By gathering and summarizing the comments, a list of training needs of the critical task respondents was compiled. Semi-structured interviews were used to collect and record expert’s opinions. The identified training needs were compared with the HAZWOPER training requirements to determine the degree of overlap. To this end, the responders with critical duties were classified into five levels according to the HAZWOPER standard. The HAZWOPER standard defines essential training for the five levels of emergency responders, including the Incident Commander (IC), Hazardous Materials Specialist, Hazardous Materials Technician, First Responder Operations Level, and First Responder Awareness Level. Finally, the proposed training needs of each responder level were compared with their corresponding responder level in the HAZWOPER standard.
Results: The four final emergency scenarios selected by experts were: atmospheric tank rim seal fire, synthesized reactor fire, H2S compressor leak, and hydrogen compressor fire. Forty-four tasks were identified as critical tasks involving twelve responders. Responders with critical duties were classified into five levels according to the HAZWOPER standard: Incident Commander, Hazardous Materials Specialist (Safety Expert), Hazardous Materials Technician (Firefighter and Fire Officer), First Responder Operations Level (head of shift operations, operation shift supervisor, and head of feed preparation units) and First Responder Awareness Level (senior security officer, security patrol, and ambulance driver). Investigating educational needs in different phases of crisis management showed that about 24% of suggested training needs by the expert team were related to the planning phase, 76% were associated to the operational phase and there were no suggested training need for recovery phase. These measures were 25, 56.25 and 18.75 percent for HAZWOPER, accordingly. Results revealed that approximately 72% of HAZWOPER requirements were covered in the suggested courses titles. Also, 52% of recommended trainings were complementary to the HAZWOPER requirements. Also, about 28% of the HAZWOPER requirements in the proposed training needs of this study were not recommended. The most educational requirement in the present study belonged to emergency group of hazardous materials technician, and in the HAWOPER standard, the group of hazardous materials specialist. Also, the lowest training requirements in both groups were related to the first responder awareness level.
Conclusion: Conclusion: the results of this study show that the determination of the educational needs of emergency response teams, based on the criticality level of their tasks and considering the levels of their responders and their specialized fields, can be very useful for effective performance and enhancing the capabilities of emergency response teams.