News story: LLWR initiative is centre stage at safety conference

An innovative safety initiative that enables LLW Repository Ltd (LLWR) to measure its performance across a range of workplace criteria was in the spotlight at a major event that brought together representatives from across the nuclear industry.

The ‘Perfect Day’ initiative, borrowed from framework contract partner NSG and adapted to meet the needs of LLWR, attracted plenty of interest at the NDA’s Safety, Health and Wellbeing Day at Energus, in west Cumbria.

A wealth of information on Perfect Day featured in a ‘Sharing Zone’, where NDA sites that had developed successful initiatives were invited to share information.

Gary Cunningham, Deputy Head of Site, hosted LLWR’s exhibition and was impressed with the high level of interest from across the industry.

“All discussions around the Perfect Day were really positive, everyone commented that it was a really good initiative that addressed the wider issues other than just focussing on high level numbers regarding accidents and injuries,” Gary said.

“I was surprised by the level of interest shown in our work management (schedule adherence) criteria aspect of the Perfect Day. Several of the other NDA sites thought that this was an excellent addition and were impressed with our performance improvement in this area since the start of the initiative.

“Several of them commented that this was an area for them that needed improvement and they were very interested in our planning and delivery processes. They suggested that they would be in touch with us in future to get more details, so watch this space.”

Perfect Day employs a metric that enables LLWR to measure its safety performance against a set of criteria. These are Safety, Quality, Environmental Stewardship, Security, Stakeholder Relations, Schedule Adherence, Standards and Expectations.

A Perfect Day is achieved only if everything goes to plan, no harm is suffered, actions are closed out on time and stakeholders are not given any reason to be unhappy with LLWR.

A running total of Perfect Days achieved in the year to date is presented on LLWR’s intranet, so the workforce can gauge progress. LLWR Perfect Day rate this year is running at around 70%.

Gary added: “To round the day off the NDA senior executive managers reviewed the day and summarised the event and outputs. In his closing thoughts David Peattie (Chief Executive Officer) mentioned LLWR’s Perfect Day a couple of times in a positive context, again hopefully giving an indication of the message that we are being recognised for what we are doing in this area.”