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The Naval Safety Center maintains a group of safety
experts who are familiar with nearly every major
platform. Program offices are encouraged to contact
Safety Center analysts in order to identify
risks documented through surveys and
investigations in order to avoid these problems (and
costs) in future systems. The Safety Center can also
help develop preliminary hazard lists and identify potential
alternative approaches to risk mitigation. Contact us using our
feedback form or call
(757) 444-3520.
The Navy and Marine Corps considers protecting
our people to be critical to our mission of national defense.
The Department of the Navy is dedicated to ensuring our men
and women are ready at all times to carry out their mission by
providing them with safe and healthful work environments. One
place to start, to ensure safe equipment and workplaces, is in
acquisition.
The Navy's Safety Program is dedicated to
enhancing readiness but ensuring every Navy and Marine Corps
workplace, both ashore and afloat, is as free from hazards as
possible. Each day thousands of safety professionals team up
with Navy and Marine Corps workers and leadership to establish
and maintain safe work environments in what are often
inherently hazardous settings - aboard military ships and
aircraft at sea as well as at ground and shore facilities.
Safety professionals pursue the Navy and Marine Corps's goals
in many ways: they train personnel in safe practices and
procedures; they oversee the procurement, installation, and
maintenance of safety equipment and systems; and they
continually provide recommendations for improving safety
conditions.
Effective acquisition safety will:
- Increase productivity through
- Streamlined work processes
- Avoidance of fatalities, injuries, and illnesses
- Save large sums of money by avoiding
- Expensive retrofits due to poor design
- Disability & retraining costs
- Lost productivity
- Improve military quality of life and military retention.
A National Safety Council Study of the Department of
Defense Safety Program estimated safety losses to the Navy,
Air Force, Army, Marine Corps and Defense agencies to be $10
to $20 billion per year. Adding focus to acquisition safety
will significantly reduce these losses.
One of the most effective ways to ensure the safety of a
system, whether as complex as a ship or an aircraft or as
uncomplicated as an aerosol dispenser, is to incorporate
health and safety requirements before buying or building the
system, at the very beginning of the acquisition process. With
the advent of rapid technological advancement and the very
real threat to our national security, the traditionally long
acquisition cycle of 10-15 years is no longer acceptable. In
recent years, acquisition reform has accelerated the rate at
which leading edge technology is harnessed for military use.
Today, acquisition reform is achieved through targeting a
three-pronged approach:
- Delivery of advanced technology through rapid
acquisition and an integrated testing and evaluation
process;
- Reduction of total ownership costs (TOC) using cost as
an independent variable (CAIV) assessment; and
- Ensuring interoperability, supportability, and
affordability by integrating the acquisition and logistics
processes.
Providing a safe and healthful workplace to all Department
of the Navy personnel by identifying and avoiding hazards
early in the acquisition process is one of the DoNs great
challenges. This challenge will be met only by designing and
building systems that control such established safety and
occupational health hazards as noise, vibration, falls,
electric shock, and chemical contamination. It is the goal of
this website to promote the incorporation of safety and
occupational health factors into all stages of the Defense
Acquisition Process by discussing the challenges,
communicating information on Best Practices, and by sharing
successful DoN acquisition safety and health initiatives.
This portion of our website is a work in progress for
addressing the most significant safety challenges facing the
Defense Acquisition and safety communities during planning of
ship, weapons, and aircraft systems. The Safety Challenges
under development are:
- Noise
- Vibration
- Ergonomics/Human Systems Integration
(HSI)
- Confined Space Entry
- Heat Stress
- Fall Protection
- Ventilation
- Non-Ionizing Radiation
- Electrical Shock and Other Hazardous Energy Sources
- Aviation technologies
- Tactical Vehicle Safety
How to Contribute to This Site
We need input from the Defense Acquisition community to
address each of the Acquisition Safety challenges that are
the subject of this website. Grow with us as we share
information on how to meet the above challenges through the
Defense Acquisition Process. Through the exchange of ideas,
information resources, and improvements in methodology and
design, these challenges can and will be met.
To submit general information or information on Best
Practices, or to submit a success story, please send an email
to safe-webmaster@navy.mil
with the subject line "Acquisition Safety."
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