Conduct a Safety Audit before setting your Goals!

Safety Audits

"Audits measure how well you are doing against your established goals and objectives. Audits are critical to the success of your goals and objectives."

Safety Audit - Program Evaluation

A safety audit evaluates safety programs and practices within an organization. Employers conducting an audit should: Measure and collect information about a safety program's reliability and effectiveness. Look at whether a safety program meets the company's stated goals.

Safety Audit - Evaluate injuries records, hazard records, safety management elements

Where have you been? (Injury/illness records, hazard reports, safety management elements, written programs and procedures) Where do you want to be? (reduce injury/illness by a certain percentage, ensure all near misses are reported, ensure all hazards are reported and fixed, implement safety management elements)

If you do not know where you've been in the past or do not know where you want to be in the future, then you won't know where to start or how effective what you plan to do or are doing even is. You need to conduct an analysis of injury/illness, hazards, and elements of Safety Management program.

Step #1-Determine where you've been in the past. Collect injury/illness records, reports of hazards by employees or teams, or known hazards for your industry. Organize your information by departments or job sites so you'll know where to focus your efforts

Step #2-Conduct a hazard assessment. Develop a checklist of hazards to look for and establish a matrix to evaluate the significance of the hazards so you can prioritize solutions

If you/your team do not know what hazards to look for then your first step will be to attend some hazard identification training. You can't just rely on common sense to identify hazards. You need to know some of the basic OSHA safety rules, so you'll know what could cause accidents in your workplace

Conduct Self Assessments/Bench Marking

• In order to get where you want to go, it is essential to know where you are starting from.
• You can use a variety of self-audit mechanisms to compare your site processes with other recognized models of excellence such as SHARP sites or Star VPP sites.
• Visiting other sites to gain first hand information is also invaluable.
• You can use perception surveys to measure the strengths and weaknesses of your site safety culture.
• These surveys can give you data from various viewpoints within the organization. For instance, you can measure differences in employees' and managers' perceptions on various issues.
• This is an excellent way to determine whether alignment issues exist and, if so, what they are. One example is the Safety and Health Program Check Up.
• At this stage, it is important to look at issues that surface as symptoms of larger system failures. For example, ask what major system failed to detect the unguarded machine, or why the system failed to notice that incident investigations are not being performed on time, or if workers are being blamed for the failures. Your greatest level of success will come when these larger system failures are recognized and addressed.

 Develop an Inspection Program

• To identify hazardous conditions and employee behavior and determine what actions are required to reduce or eliminate accident potential. 
• Additionally, inspections can help determine the extent to which employees adhere to the company's safety program, operating procedures, rules and regulations.
• Developing a self-inspection program and associated checklists can help to protect company assets from fire, employee injury and injury to the public.  
• Their development will require the attention of someone who has a sound knowledge of the company's operations and as well as knowledge of relevant safety standards and local codes.
• The self-inspection program should be a process of fact finding with an emphasis on identifying potential hazards and developing the necessary corrective actions necessary to eliminate them.
• Routine site safety and health inspections are designed to catch hazards missed at other stages. This type of inspection should be done at regular intervals, generally on a weekly basis. In addition, procedures should be established that provide a daily inspection of the work area

You can use a checklist already developed or make your own, based on:
~ Past problems.
~ Standards that apply to your industry.
~ Input from everyone involved.
~ Your company's safety practices or rules.

Important things to remember about inspections are:
~ Inspections should cover every part of the work site.
~ They should be done at regular intervals.
~ In-house inspectors should be trained to recognize and control hazards.
~ Identified hazards should be tracked to correction.
~ Information from inspections should be used to improve the hazard prevention and control program.

Need help conducting your first audit?

Author: Deborah Grow, Safety Specialist

Private Safety Consultant, assistant Damon Fall Protection and Coordinator EHS Network ~ Kansas.   Extensive safety experience in General Industry, Construction, D.O.T. Compliance, and OSHA consultation project.  Contact Deborah if you would like to schedule a consultation

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