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About

About the Life-Saving Rules

IOGP believe no loss of life due to an accident at work is acceptable. In the last ten years 376 people lost their lives in incidents that might have been prevented by following one of IOGP’s Life-Saving Rules. The Rules are not a replacement for a management system, competent people, site rules or procedures – but when these barriers fail, following the Rules is a final barrier, designed for the worker to have complete control over, that will keep him or her safe

IOGP’s original 8 Core and 10 Supplemental Life-Saving Rules were created following analysis of thousands of fatal accident reports and High Potential near misses. This updated and simplified set of Life-Saving Rules was created following analysis of a further 10 years of fatal accident data and account for over 370 fatalities. An industry team of subject matter experts, HSE and operations professionals got together as a task force and created the updated set of Life-Saving Rules that, if followed rigorously, will have the greatest impact on eliminating fatalities.

No, if you have implemented the original IOGP Life-Saving Rules without modification, then you will be keeping you and your people safe. With additional seven years of data and based on feedback from member companies, we have streamlined the original 18 down to 9 while retaining the effectiveness of fatality prevention, as well as rephrasing the Rules to be written from the workers perspective.

Yes, for the benefit of industry standardisation, we recommend companies change to revised Life-Saving Rules. Standardisation of Life-Saving Rules across the oil and gas industry:

  • Enables better transfer of knowledge, experience and lessons learned.
  • Increases individual awareness ownership of critical safeguards that prevent fatalities
  • Is a step towards an industry-wide common safety language.
  • Allows for ease of implementation and consistent use by contractors and operators.

For these reasons, as well as the simplification and reduction of the Rules, we are calling on Companies to consider changing to the new set of Life-Saving Rules to help with Industry standardisation and learning and work with the rest of Industry to eliminate fatalities at the workplace.

We wanted to revise the content based on the latest available data, simplify the number of Rules, improving clarity to the workforce, and including feedback and best practices from IOGP Members.

We are not anticipating any change. We will continue to monitor the impact of the Rules through our annual safety performance indicators.  Any future changes would only take place with approval of IOGP Members.

We do appreciate many companies have their own Life-Saving Rules, or equivalent, that they are attached to and have been very successful for them. We are not suggesting these are not effective, however, if we are to eliminate fatalities in our Industry, we need to work together as an Industry, and that means doing the same thing in the same way wherever possible.  If we all have different Life-Saving or golden Rules, then contractors, who do 80% of our work, must learn multiple ways of doing the same thing – apart from being inefficient and confusing, it introduces risk as workers struggle to remember which process they are supposed to follow. By adopting the same Life-Saving Rules, in addition to the reasons given in Q4:

  • We can compare the outcomes of implementing a standardized process among organisations
  • We can compare incident and accident findings to improve the efficacy of the Rules
  • Workers can relate to one another using a common language and terminology
  • Workers can learn from each other through comparing experiences doing the same thing in the same way, thereby addressing problems and learning what has worked and not worked and why
  • It is more time and cost efficient as we are not constantly retraining workers to follow company specific Life-Saving Rules.

Yes, IOGP’s vision of success is for the whole industry to adopt IOGP’s Life-Saving Rules.  The contractor community asked for a standard set of Life-Saving Rules.