Lloyd’s Register Foundation and The Nautical Institute have produced a special limited edition bound set of all 40 issues of the Institute’s Alert! human element bulletin.

Enough have been produced for every maritime training college in the world to have a copy, so all will have access to the topics and case studies covered by the bulletin over its 14-year history.

Some 2.5 million of the four series of Alert! bulletins comprising 350 articles have been distributed around the world; 21 innovative videos were produced for free for download and a reference library of 250 papers has been made available online.

Bulletin editor Commodore David Squire said that Alert! had developed into a “powerful tool” for promoting the importance of the human element in shipping. From the beginning the project has “raised awareness” of maritime professionals across the industry to human element issues.

“This compilation – backed up by the website www.he-alert.org – represents a substantial body of human element knowledge.” He added that the information was as relevant today as at the start of the project and will remain so for the future “because no matter how much business needs change and how much technology is introduced, there will always be a need for human intervention.”

One of the strengths of the project was that it looked at all parts of the industry, showing how human element principles can be applied at all stages in the design, operation, updating and maintenance of any ship and its systems.

Dr Jonathan Earthy, Human Factors Coordinator, Technical Directorate, Lloyd’s Register Marine and Offshore, said the project was made up of seven closely related projects – four series of the bulletin, each with a different theme; the website with its large library of reports; video versions of series 1 and 2 of the bulletin and the development of a human element competence model submitted to IMO.

The article appeared in MarEx 2017-07-05