In Chapter 1 the authors provide a brief history of human performance, from when the nuclear power industry began attempts to educate their workforce and INPO’s programmatic move to operationalize the ideas. to the first attempts of the biopharma manufacturing industry to solve their ‘human error’ problem.
The chapter explains the current misunderstanding within biopharma that ‘human error’ is a cause rather than an outcome. This fallacy is given life by by regulators and senior leaders. The authors provide a definition for both ‘human error’ and human performance.
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Illustration of Robustness Versus Resilience
Episode Footnotes
According to McNab et al, system thinking involves exploring the characteristics of components within a system, such as work tasks and technology, and how they interconnect to improve understanding of how outcomes emerge from these interactions.
In the biopharmaceutical industry, the term human factor(s) is often misused as a synonym for human error. The term should always be used in reference to work processes and technology being designed to fit people.
System safety is the forward-looking identification and control of hazards to acceptable levels to prevent mishaps.
Human performance, or human and organizational performance, was born of concepts that originated in cognitive system engineering from the 1970s. Cognitive system engineering then evolved over thirty to forty years into what is now known as new view, safety differently, Safety-II, and resilience engineering; all of which share common ideas, concepts, and practices. Human and organizational performance has matured as it stayed connected to the offshoots of cognitive systems engineering.
The INPO Special Review Committee on human performance was established to examine ways to create a working environment that enhanced human performance at nuclear plants.
The Three Mile Island reactor near Middletown, Pa. partially melted down on March 28th, 1979. This was the most serious accident in U.S. commercial nuclear power plant operating history, although its small radioactive releases had no detectable health effects on plant workers or the public. Its aftermath brought about sweeping changes involving emergency response planning, reactor operator training, human factors engineering, radiation protection, and many other areas of nuclear power plant operations.
Capacity factor is the measure of how often a power plant runs for a specific period of time. It’s expressed as a percentage and calculated by dividing the actual unit electricity output by the maximum possible output.