ABSTRACT
The production process that is the assessment, whose operations are described in the preceding chapter of this book, result in a final outcome-a list of conclusions and recommendations. The following question immediately comes to mind: what effects do these recommendations have on the safety of the assessed facilities? This question imposes the choice of a conventional definition of safety – safety learned following a number of incidents, safety as a set of barriers, safety as a dynamic non-event protected by socio-cultural processes. Such a (possibly hybrid) choice would raise a number of tricky questions – How can a reduction in the number of incidents be attributed to the application of a recommendation? Do the barriers in place make it possible to effectively avert an incident? How can the socio-cultural processes that would enable the incident to be averted be characterized? To answer these questions and be able to hope to establish a link between the experts’ recommendations and safety would require having a sufficient number of skills and resources and involve active participation of the facilities’ employees and the experts’ central services.
