BP Canada turned its drill rigs into classrooms and created Make A Difference Today (MADT). Daily roundtable safety discussions at BP are making a difference, every day.
Harold Wells, a Drilling and Completions manager in BP Canada's Western Operations looks at drill site safety this way: "If I think my son shouldn't be working there, there's a problem." How to solve that problem is an industry-wide challenge-one that BP Canada addressed with considerable success in 2006.
BP’s Make A Difference Today (MADT) daily roundtable
safety discussions are making a difference, every day.
BP Canada turned its drill rigs into classrooms and created Make A Difference Today (MADT). Originating at BP's Empress Gas Plant in Alberta, the innovative safety program goes beyond traditional programs that only identify common workplace danger areas by also developing a practical teaching method to eliminate the factors that lead to an incident or injury.
Each crew member takes a week-long turn leading daily roundtable safety discussions on where potential dangers might be lurking and how to mitigate them. The key elements of the daily MADT conversation are designed to get the crew thinking about how to plan, protect or position members as the day's work progresses. It becomes clear to everyone that, "the fellow next to me could save my life," says Wells.
In just one year BP Canada's rig site recordable injury incidents dropped 78 per cent as a result of the MADT program.
The program's outstanding success in the field is due to the active participation of the rig workers themselves who own and operate the program. "It's peers working with peers, working from the bottom up," says Wells.
This unique proactive approach to safety and health has proven so successful that BP Canada is seeing the program migrate to BP's international drilling locations, showing that sometimes peer pressure can be a good thing-when it contributes to a safer working environment.