A systemic approach to measuring fire safety performance

Traditionally, fire safety approaches have been reactive rather than proactive. They have tended to focus on technical aspects and look for the immediate causes of incidents or accidents after they have taken place. Negative outcomes have been seen as means to measure the organisation's fire safety performance. More recently, fire safety approaches have focused on assessing the consequences of the fire risk inherent in the organisation's operations more proactively. They may however not address human factors. There is a need to understand the systemic nature of fire safety, so that both technical and human factors can be addressed as a coherent whole. Moreover, this understanding should help to quantify the organisation's fire safety performance. This paper presents a systemic approach that may be used to measure an organisation's fire safety performance. This system is intended to facilitate an understanding of the systemic nature of fire safety and to help organisations to maintain fire risk within an acceptable range.