Confidentiality in aviation SMS refers to how much personal information should be made available to your organization. By personal information, we are mainly talking about personal information in safety reports, such as people involved or the name of the reporter.
When safety issues are reported, employees may or may not have access to details about the reported issue. When employees do have access, or when you release information about a reported issue, you will need to decide if employees who are not directly involved can view information like:
Confidentiality in SMS is something that you should take a stance on and, if applicable, create a confidentiality policy that you can adhere to. Considerations for confidentiality are:
To structure your stance on confidentiality, you need to consider factors that affect confidentiality in SMS.
Transparency is a term that refers to how much information is shared by managers across your organization. A company’s stance on confidentiality is based on its level of transparency. Organizations that have a:
Having a liberal stance on confidentiality (i.e., you don’t sanitize safety reports) but a high level of transparency, then you are likely to run into trouble because you have a conflict of interest with confidentiality and transparency. If you already have a transparency policy, this should provide valuable guidance for creating a confidentiality policy.
When considering your company's stance on confidentiality, several factors will affect the type of confidentiality that it makes sense to have. You may even create a confidentiality policy and communicate it to employees.
Before creating your confidentiality policy/stance, you should answer the following questions:
Confidentiality should arise in part out of the stance your management wants to take, and in part out of what your organization needs based on the above questions.
Confidentiality changes depending on the size of an organization.
People talk. In smaller aviation service provider organizations where people know each other, important information is likely to get around. If something happens, almost everyone is likely to know about it. In other words, in a smaller organization, there is a different mentality about confidentiality.
In larger organizations things are different. There are different:
All of these are natural barriers to communication and information, making it easier to create confidential controls. Secondly, it is probably necessary to do so – employees in one division don’t usually need to know about safety issues in another division.
Existing safety culture should be a large consideration when forming confidential policies around:
In mature aviation safety cultures, you have flexibility with your stance on confidentiality as employees are likely to:
In negative safety cultures, employees may do the following if confidential information is included in safety reports available to employees:
Before committing to a confidentiality policy, make sure to assess your safety culture and understand what confidential policy is realistic for your SMS.
Some good things to do before creating a confidential stance are:
Last updated June 2024.