blog

May 24, 2023

Move ship safety into a new era with ShipInspect

Insight Industry Product

ShipInspect keeps your ships, and your crew running with effective safety management

The commercial marine industry can be a dangerous profession, and crew injuries are unfortunately all too common. Exact injury rates can vary depending on the type of vessel and the type of work being performed, as well as other factors such as the experience level of the crew members.

                           

Three times the national average for injury

Overall, however, the U.S. Bureau of Labour Statistics reports that the injury and illness rate for commercial fishing and other maritime workers is more than three times the national average for all industries. Many injuries are caused by slips, trips, and falls on wet or uneven surfaces, as well as being struck by objects or getting caught in machinery.

The impact of injuries on commercial marine crew members can be severe, both personally and professionally. Injuries can lead to physical pain and long-term health complications, as well as financial strain due to medical bills and lost wages from time off work. In some cases, injuries can even lead to permanent disability or death. There is also the obvious impact on the businesses those crew work for, with the average cost of an accident being more than $65,000 USD.

 

Moving ship safety into the modern era

Effective management of safety is a core requirement of every Shipnet customer. For many years now, we have helped our customers effectively manage risk, log incidents, complete root cause analyses, and track follow up actions. This, on top of class-leading document management functionality, has ensured that we have been trusted by some of the world’s largest and most prestigious ship owners,operators and managers.

However, it is important to note that advancements in technology, training, and safety measures have contributed to a decline in overall accident rates in recent years. To play our part, we’ve recently been working on ways of making our solution better, and we spent time talking to crews who use both ours and other vendors’ systems.

 

Data collection at the source, and understanding it

It became clear during these conversations that a major challenge for users of these solutions (and the people with a responsibility for safety management) is accurately capturing all of the incidents and near-misses that happen. Failing to get both good data and a complete view of things that aren’t supposed to happen means that actions to improve and avoid adverse outcomes will never be as effective as they should be.

We were told a major barrier to gathering complete and accurate data was the inability to contemporaneously record incidents, so we started to focus on giving anyone and everyone the power to record and submit the needed data froma convenient and easy to use mobile application.

 

A proven solution – ready to help your business

This application is now in the hands of the customers we worked with to define the specification and the look and feel, and shortly we will begin making it available to the rest of our customer base.

 

If you want to improve your compliance, incident and near-miss logging and gain confidence that your SMS is safeguarding both your team and your business, please give us a call to discuss how we can help you.

John Wills

VP Product

Get in touch to find out more, and we'll get back to you to set up a demo for your business.