Health Risk Assessment in Maritime Operations and Ship Design: a Framework for addressing Health-related Risks in the context of Maritime Safety Assessment

Large passenger vessels, such as Cruise and RoPax vessels, can be extremely vulnerable to communicable diseases, as the COVID-19 pandemic has shown lately in addition to earlier health events related to other viruses and diseases. Thus, managing major disease outbreaks in the maritime industry constitutes a big challenge, aiming to address the significant risks arising from an uncontrolled spreading, either through risk controls for maritime operations or alternatives for ship design. To answer this challenge, this paper introduces health aspects into maritime safety assessment, considering the daily risk management from shipping companies, the IMO’s Formal Safety Assessment (FSA) and the Risk-Based Design (RBD) framework. Health risk assessment is incorporated into the framework in terms of major outbreaks, regarding both their probability of occurrence and consequences. The result is a structured and formalised procedure based on the process of IMO’s FSA, and built according to the standards of RBD. The framework, with a suitable risk metric, should be capable of assessing health-related risks and risk control options, by also considering cost-efficiency and other criteria in a holistic assessment. Future steps include the implementation of the framework into ship and spreading cases for actual establishment and adaptation to the industry needs, considering also experience and practices from the medical field.