VGB Safety & Health Award 2016
The VGB Safety & Health Award has been established in 2012 to underline the increased importance of Safety & Health in the power and heat generation sector.
The VGB Safety & Health Award 2016 was awarded to
- Electricite de France.
The award was granted for the excellent example of the EDF’s Transmission and System Engineering Center (CIST), presented by Vincent Guignard and Didier Lachenal, how to develop a common and participative health and safety approach in order to avoid any accident in a construction site.
On behalf of EDF, Jean-Francois Lehougre received the VGB Safety & Health Award 2016 from Dr Bernhard Fischer and Erland Christensen.
Among others, EDF-CIST is an EDF’s entity dealing with the technical support of operation and maintenance of the high voltage transmission systems and equipment. On the construction sites, EDF-CIST entrusts to a network of subcontractors. “This fact complicates the establishment of a global policy of risk prevention”, said Vincent Guignard, safety prevention specialist (“preventor”). “We prefer a partner-ship approach based on cooperation and exchange. We proposed to our sub-contracting companies to build a network of prevention specialists, to share information, best practices, feedback, which ensure the spread of a common safety culture. It is a voluntary approach of the companies, which stay in our site and act with us.
The organization is quite simple and flexible: each company, which wants to join us in this common safety approach, has to subscribe to a safety charter and thus to attend with other companies some thematic working groups. All actors are welcome to these working groups: safety adviser, safety managers and also work supervisors.
Initiated in 2013, this approach takes the form of various initiatives that have contributed to a significant drop of the accident frequency rate, decreasing from 9 in 2012 to 2 in 2014. Last year we didn’t have any accident with loss time; this performance must be sustained in the future. New companies have joined us in this approach and the safety charter 2015 has been signed by 24 subcontractors. Our approach involves companies at executive level, but also the management and especially the work supervisors. Without the active participation of these operational teams, we wouldn’t go so fast! This allows each company to increase its safety level according to its resources, in its own pace, but in a coordinated and coherent effort that benefits all. The coordination of the OSH network done by the CIST is a major focus of the Action Plan ‘Performance Health Safety of the Thermal Operating and Engineering Department of EDF 2018’.”