The four Principles of Product Safety

“Products” take many forms - tangible products like aircraft or bridges, intangible products like software or licences and services like maintenance or cleaning. If any of them are unsafe, the victims are frequently not the people who design, build or supply the product but the customers, users or third parties. Product safety management is therefore often quite different from the more mature and understood activity of workplace safety management. This paper provides some of the findings from an industrially funded review of Product Safety practices across a number of sectors and identifies 4 Principles of Product Safety that span the sectors included in the review.