PSEs

PSEs, or Process Safety Events, are incidents recognized within process safety management as having the potential to cause major adverse outcomes in industrial facilities such as chemical plants, refineries, and pharmaceutical operations. A PSE can be an actual release or release-related event that results in loss of containment, fires, explosions, or environmental damage, as well as events that could have caused such consequences but did not. The term is used to track and learn from safety performance in order to prevent serious incidents.

In practice, PSEs are recorded and analyzed to identify trends, root causes, and opportunities for improvement. Data collected typically includes the date and location, process unit involved, nature of the safety failure, any containment losses, injuries or environmental impacts, emergency response actions, and the results of an investigation. PSEs are often categorized by severity and by contributing factors, such as equipment failure, human factors, procedural gaps, or management-system weaknesses. Many programs also count near-miss events, recognizing their value for preventing escalation into actual incidents.

PSE investigations aim to identify immediate causes and underlying system issues, leading to corrective actions that strengthen design, operation, maintenance, management of change, and training. PSE trends inform leadership decisions, risk assessments, and safety culture development, and they are frequently reported to regulatory bodies, industry groups, and internal stakeholders as part of ongoing performance improvement.

Note: PSE can have other meanings in different fields, but in industrial safety it most commonly refers to Process Safety Events.