Safety first: why collective effort and practical insight is essential to deliver safer outcomes across the marine contracting industry

On World Day for Safety and Health at Work, IMCA Safety and Security Manager Mark Holmes highlights why collaboration among IMCA Members is vital to improve safety and deliver healthier workplaces.

The United Nations’ annual World Day for Safety and Health at Work is a timely reminder that prevention is not built through slogans, campaigns, or good intentions alone. In high-risk industries, it is built through evidence, discipline, learning and a willingness to look honestly at where risk remains.

As the global trade association for offshore marine contractors, IMCA has an important role in supporting technical excellence, encouraging greater consistency across the industry, and giving voice to the realities contractors face in hazardous offshore operations. Health and safety sits at the heart of that. It runs through how IMCA brings Members together, develops guidance, shares learning, and helps the industry focus on the issues that matter most.

A key part of that work is turning collective experience into practical insight. That includes gathering and analysing safety data from Members to inform our Annual Safety Report, publishing Safety Flashes, developing guidance, and creating opportunities for Members to discuss what needs attention. The aim is to help the offshore marine contracting industry improve performance in ways that are practical, relevant, and grounded in operational reality.

The collection of safety data from contractor Member companies is a central part of that effort. Good data helps patterns emerge that may not be visible within any one company alone. It helps identify recurring exposures, areas of concern, and questions that deserve deeper attention, as well as providing meaningful benchmarking against the wider industry.

Across offshore energy, organisations such as IOGP, G+, and IADC also play important roles in collecting, analysing, and sharing safety data and learning. Offshore oil and gas and renewables are the two sectors in which most IMCA Members work, and IMCA’s contribution should be seen alongside those efforts, not separate from them.

There is real value in greater alignment across the offshore system, particularly where expectations, rules, and guidance affect the same contractor community. Contractors often work across sectors, see risk from the operational front line, and are well placed to share what is working, what is not, and where unnecessary differences in approach make life harder without improving safety.

One area where this matters the most is in the prevention of serious injuries and fatalities. Across high-risk sectors, there is increasing recognition that traditional safety activity does not always provide sufficient assurance against the events that matter most. It is possible to be active and compliant, and yet still remain exposed to low-frequency, high-consequence risks.

That is why I see critical control management (CCM) as such an important discipline. It starts with understanding a company’s critical health, safety, and operational risks clearly enough to know where the greatest potential for serious harm or major failure sits. From there, the task is to identify the controls needed to prevent those events and to determine which of those controls are truly critical.

In my work at the International Council on Mining and Metals I saw how valuable CCM can be in bringing sharper discipline to fatality prevention. It helped move the conversation beyond whether controls existed on paper and towards whether they were genuinely capable of preventing the most serious outcomes. There is real value in learning from other high-risk industries, not to lift approaches wholesale, but to understand what can be adapted usefully to offshore operations.

The question is not simply whether critical controls have been defined, but whether they work when needed most. Are they implemented when required? Do they perform as intended in the field? Are they verified in ways that reflect operational reality, rather than just compliance with process? Are organisations too dependent on administrative arrangements or human-only barriers where stronger safeguards are needed? For serious injuries and fatalities, these are the tests that matter.

CCM becomes even more useful when considered alongside High Reliability Organisation principles, Human and Organisational Performance, and Human Factors.

Each bring something different. CCM focuses on understanding the critical health, safety, and operational risks a company faces, and then identifying the few critical safeguards that must work to prevent fatal or other high-consequence events.

High Reliability Organisation (HRO) principles bring a wider discipline of vigilance: paying attention to weak signals, resisting oversimplification, staying sensitive to operations, building resilience, and deferring to expertise.

Human and Organisational Performance (HOP) shifts the focus away from blaming individuals and towards understanding the conditions in which people work, recognising that error is normal, context drives behaviour, learning is vital, and management response shapes culture. Human factors adds a practical dimension by examining how people interact with tasks, equipment, procedures, environments, and one another, and by helping design work so that it is safer, clearer, and more reliable in real operating conditions.

These are complementary, not competing, ideas. CCM helps define what must work. HRO helps organisations stay alert to drift, emerging risk, and small failures before they become serious events. HOP helps organisations learn from failure without defaulting to blame, and improve the systems around people rather than simply trying to correct behaviour. Human factors helps turn that understanding into better task design, stronger interfaces, more realistic procedures, and working conditions that support good performance. Taken together they form a better ecosystem for prevention than compliance activity alone.

For IMCA Members, the message is straightforward. Better benchmarking, better learning, and better guidance depend on better data. More effective prevention of serious injuries and fatalities depends on greater confidence in the controls that matter most. Stronger safety performance depends on a willingness to look honestly at where systems are robust, where they are vulnerable, and where the industry can learn together.

It also depends on recognising that contractors have a distinctive contribution to make. They often carry out the most hazardous work offshore, and there is a strong case for greater harmonisation where it is practical, making sure the contractor voice is fully part of the conversation. Safety, in that sense, is not just the responsibility of IMCA’s safety team. It runs through IMCA’s wider role in technical leadership, standardisation, member engagement, and advocacy.

So, World Day for Safety and Health at Work reminds us of a shared responsibility. Prevention is not built in a day. It is built before the incident, through openness, evidence, discipline and collective effort.

IMCA’s role is to help turn that collective effort into practical insight and, ultimately, into safer outcomes across the industry.

Mark Holmes

Safety & Security Manager, IMCA