Port Profiles: Sarah Crawford
Meet Sarah Crawford, Port of Aberdeen's SHEQ Advisor who joined the port in August 2015.
Safe horizons: women shaping the future of maritime safety
As a member of the port's Safety, Health, Environment, and Quality (SHEQ) Department, Sarah has a duty to maintain the effective management of the My Compliance Safety Management System and the ISO 14001:2015, 45001:2018, and 9001:2015 accreditations.
Among other things, she is also responsible for investigating port related SHEQ incidents, identifying the root cause, and providing preventative recommendations.
Sarah is a champion for Mental Health and has on numerous occasions over her nine years' service, encouraged the importance of maintaining employee wellbeing to achieve a positive safety culture.
Ensuring Zero Harm
Sarah is proud to be part of an organisation committed in the journey to reach Zero Harm through cooperation, communication, and collaboration. She ensures safety through positive cross departmental relationships, robust completion of risk assessments, and by adhering to safe systems of work.
In addition, Sarah also ensures safety through regularly reviewing and updating port policies and procedures to reflect current safety, health, and environmental legislation, best practise, and industry guidelines. Through the gathering of incident data and near miss reporting, she is also able to identify areas of strength and weakness to embed proactive measures to reduce the risks of workplace accidents.
The importance of a safe working environment
Like many other safety professionals, one of the many aims in Sarah's profession is to ensure a safe working environment for employees and port users so they can all go home to their families at the end of the working day.
It wasn’t until Sarah had children of her own that she really began to think on a personal level of the consequences a work related accident or incident may have on her own life. Sarah endeavours to continue to promote safety, both physically and mentally, across the organisation for the benefit of employees, port users, and the business as a whole.
Port of Aberdeen currently uses a number of channels to promote safety such as safety group meetings, safety campaigns, safety bulletins, and through awareness training, to name but a few. However, the key enabler that Sarah believes is most successful in the port's journey to Zero Harm is empowering employees to have the confidence to intervene and stop the job if they believe it’s unsafe.
Sarah feels that by including employees in decision making and giving them a voice, we will continue to provide a safe working environment for employees and port users to the highest of standards.
