The development of a fire safety management system model

Traditionally, both academe and practitioners have tended to address fire safety by focusing on technical aspects and looking for the immediate causes of fire incidents or accidents after they have taken place. More recently, organisations have focused on assessing pro-actively the consequences of the fire risk inherent in their operations. However, fire safety still tends to be addressed in isolation, though fire loss in an emergent property of a system. An organisation's emergent properties result from the interrelated activities of people who design it, manage it and operate it. Because of the need to understand the systemic nature of fire safety, this research project has addressed the problem of what an organisation needs to do so that fire risk can be maintained within an acceptable range throughout the life cycle of the organisation's operations. A fire safety management system (FSMS) model has been developed in an attempt to address the research problem. This systematic approach to managing fire safety may help to maintain acceptable fire safety in a coherent way in an organisation's operations. It is hoped that this approach will lead not only to more effective management of fire safety, but also to more effective management of safety, health and the environment for any organisation. The contribution of this research project is not only to the existing understanding of fire safety, but also to health, safety and the environment. Moreover, it has established the concept of a 'viability' of the FSMS in quantitative terms.

The research process was threefold. First, a thorough review of existing literature on health, safety and environment and systems thinking was conducted. This process helped to establish the FSMS model. Second, the FSMS model was compared with some existing safety management systems, after which a very simple computer simulation was conducted to further explore the FSMS model. Finally, conclusions and implications of the research project have been drawn.