Keeping Process Safety Management Intact during Global Pandemic

Process Safety Management (PSM) is the backbone of any process industry and is fundamental to its businesses, plant reliability, safe operations, employee well-being and prevention of catastrophic events. In order to grow or sustain business and be responsible for its employees' health, good organizations never compromise on the foundation of PSM in their business and operational decisions. But what if a deadly disease alters the way how organizations and systems typically work? Can we quickly adapt to such unprecedented challenges? Are we able to fulfill all requirements of a process safety management system in this extraordinary scenario? The paper will cover this topic in detail and it will shed light on the encountered challenges and tested best practices in order to maintain PSM during a global pandemic. Effects of a pandemic on key important factors related to PSM will be discussed like management of change, employee motivation, process hazard analysis, job supervision, process monitoring, competency levels, training & development etc. Building on similar personal experience, the paper will also cover many interesting methods and suggestions for safety professionals and line managers to successfully adapt to the changes in this scenario while not compromising their process safety management systems. © 36th Center for Chemical Process Safety International Conference, CCPS 2021 - Topical Conference at the 2021 AIChE Spring Meeting and 17th Global Congress on Process Safety.

Pandemic Crisis, Power and the Role of the State

We build on the experience of the COVID-19 crisis to investigate how a State owned and a private company, such as the national health system, are managed when a crisis may occur. We develop our analysis considering an incomplete contract model. We concentrate our attention on the incentives for economic agents assuming that the State expropriates property rights in the crisis event. The choice between public and private health system depends on three key elements: expropriation degree of the State/power of the private sector, damage of cost reduction innovations, probability of a crisis event. If the probability of the crisis is high, the damage is significant and the contracting power of the manager is strong then public ownership may be optimal because cost innovations are more aligned to the first best solution than in case of a private ownership.

Keeping Process Safety Management Intact during Global Pandemic

Process Safety Management (PSM) is the backbone of any process industry and is fundamental to its businesses,plant reliability,safe operations,employee well-being and prevention of catastrophic events. In order to grow or sustain business and be responsible for its employees health,good organizations never compromise on the foundation of PSM in their business and operational decisions. But what if a deadly disease alters the way how organizations and systems typically work? Can we quickly adapt to such unprecedented challenges? Are we able to fulfill all requirements of a process safety management system in this extraordinary scenario? The paper will cover this topic in detail and it will shed light on the encountered challenges and tested best practices in order to maintain PSM during a global pandemic. Effects of a pandemic on key important factors related to PSM will be discussed like management of change,employee motivation,process hazard analysis,job supervision,process monitoring,competency levels,training & development etc. Building on similar personal experience,the paper will also cover many interesting methods and suggestions for safety professionals and line managers to successfully adapt to the changes in this scenario while not compromising their process safety management systems. Copyright © American Institute of Chemical Engineers. All rights reserved.

Learning Domain-Specific Word Embeddings from COVID-19 Tweets

The COVID-19 global pandemic has been a major catastrophic event that impacted the world's economy. During the pandemic there was a rise in the use of social media such as Twitter by people to express their reactions and responses to the global pandemic. This drove researchers to analyze these micro-blogging texts, using natural language processing (NLP) methods, to understand information inherent in those texts. Most of these NLP tasks employ the use of word embeddings in training neural network models. These word embeddings are mainly trained on general text corpus which produce sub-optimal performance when used in domain-specific NLP tasks such as in COVID-19 related tweets. In this paper, we present a learned COVID-19 tweets domain-specific word embeddings for use in COVID-19 related tweets NLP tasks. Our evaluation results show that our domain-specific COVID-19 tweets word embeddings perform better than pretrained general word embeddings in a downstream domain-specific NLP task. Our COVID-19 tweets word embeddings are available for use by researchers who wish to perform downstream NLP tasks with pretrained domain-specific COVID-19 tweets word embeddings. © 2021 IEEE.

Anxiety of pregnant women in time of catastrophic events, including COVID-19 pandemic: a systematic review and meta-analysis.

PURPOSE: In March 2020, daily life was disrupted by the new virus SARS-CoV-2, which causes COVID-19. Pandemic-related prenatal anxiety could lead to depression, a risk factor for adverse pregnancy outcomes and abnormal neonatal development. This study aimed to investigate the impact of anxiety on the mental health of pregnant women exposed to catastrophic events as compared to those without such exposure. MATERIALS AND METHODS: PubMed/MEDLINE, Web of Science, Cochrane Library, Scopus, and EMBASE were searched for relevant studies. This study compared the prevalence of anxiety among pregnant women during a catastrophic event. RESULTS: Fifteen full texts were assessed for inclusion, with 3 included, 10 excluded for not meeting criteria, and 2 excluded for other reasons. The included studies were published before the current COVID-19 pandemic but included the SARS 2003 outbreak. During the current COVID-19 pandemic, 10 further studies were conducted, but they failed to meet the inclusion criteria. A meta-analysis of two studies using STAI revealed that women exposed to a catastrophic event had a higher mean STAI score of 1.82 points (95% CI: 0.47-3.18 points). CONCLUSION: Women with complications during pregnancy should be assessed for anxiety independently from catastrophic events. During financial crises, environmental or other disasters, special attention should be given to women with low risk, normal pregnancies.