ABSTRACT
Complex safety critical organizations, such as nuclear power, oil and gas, health-care, and various modes of transport, place a great deal of reliance on the skills and behaviour of their professional workforce in order to safely conduct everyday high-risk operations. These organisations generally operate at the leading edge of advanced technology, yet incidents and accidents, involving major damage to assets and sometimes loss of life, are still a major issue, particularly when investigations reveal that highly skilled and well trained personnel are involved. Following a series of major accidents in the aviation industry during the 1970s, a behavioural and flightdeck risk management training intervention, now known as Crew Resource Management (CRM), was introduced. CRM has been successfully adapted to address the needs of many high-risk, high-reliability organisations on a global basis, but in order to ensure that the CRM training targets developing issues, and remains relevant, it is essential to evaluate the resulting trainee safety performance in the workplace and feed those results back into the training continuum.
