The first North West Regional Group meeting of 2015 took place on 10 March at the AREVA offices in Birchwood Park, Warrington. The group co-ordinator Emma Ridsdale welcomed an excellent turn-out of 18 human factors practitioners.
After the usual welcomes, the evening was kicked off by Claire Dickinson who gave a brief introduction to the Centre for Registration of European Ergonomists (CREE), and the requirement for achieving registration as a European Ergonomist.
For Institute members this appears to be a straightforward process. Registration is intended to demonstrate that a person has attained specified levels of education and experience to be competent to practise as an ergonomist in Europe. Recognition may be advantageous for members seeking work outside our own shores, and, as many of us work for companies with either ownership or interests abroad, it was considered that this may be a useful status to attain.
Following this, there was a brief announcement from Dave Gledhill regarding the recent re-organisation of the Nuclear Energy Special Interest Group (NESIG). The NESIG has seen the formation of a 12-strong organising committee to take over the workload of running the group from the individuals who have been doing all the hard work for the past few years.
a presentation from Ned Hickling entitled “Identifying and Analysing Errors of Commission”. Ned discussed recent work that he had undertaken to try to better capture the impact of errors of commission within Probabilistic Safety Assessments. Defining Errors of Commission as being “Errors which are not errors of Omission”, Ned discussed how difficult it was to accurately define such errors, and the impact such under assessment may have on PSAs. The presentation sparked much lively debate amongst the audience, as should all interesting presentations, with several attendees continuing the discussion after the meeting had formally finished.
All in all, the evening was well attended and a great success.