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AELERT PODCAST: Professor Andrew Hopkins presents ‘Improving the effectiveness of regulatory regimes’.
30/06/2017
Regulation is one of the most important components in preventing major accidents.
Major accidents have organisational factors and in this podcast Professor Hopkins recommends how regulators can highlight those causes and challenge companies to do something about them.
Andrew Hopkins is Emeritus Professor in the School of Sociology at The Australian National University. He is a distinguished scholar and an internationally- renowned presenter, author and consultant in the field of industrial safety and accident analysis.
Professor Hopkins has researched major industrial disasters in hazardous industries including investigations into disasters at the Moura and Gretley coal mines as well as the catastrophic BP Gulf of Mexico accident. He was an expert witness at the Royal Commission into the causes of the fire at Esso’s gas plant at Longford in 1998 and in 2001 and an expert member of a Board of Inquiry into the poisoning of F111 maintenance workers at Amberley Air Force Base.
He has published widely across the field of organisational safety, authoring titles including Disastrous Decisions, Failure to Learn, Lessons from Longford, Lessons from Gretley, and Safety, Culture and Risk. These books have together sold more than 90,000 copies.
His primary research interests are occupational learning, expertise, and decision making. Recent research includes a study of generational change in the gas pipeline industry and its impact on safety practices and professionalism, and the present study of safety incentive schemes in hazardous industries.
