edpManagement Systems
for Health Safety + Environment
health, safety and environment consultants
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Monitoring
Keeping Tabs on Your
Health and Safety
To demonstrate that a system is successful, you must have some form of measurement in place to monitor or test its effectiveness. Otherwise, you cannot be sure it is achieving its design objectives, or that it is cost-effective.
Making it a line-management responsibility to monitor health and safety performance, can help to reinforce management's commitment to health and safety objectives. It can also encourages an effective health and safety culture by positively rewarding work done to control risk.
Two types of system are required:
- Active systems that monitor the design, development, installation and operation of management arrangements, risk control systems and workplace precautions.
- Reactive systems that monitor accidents, ill health, incidents and other evidence of deficient health and safety performance.
HSG 65
Inspections
Inspections are conducted by one or more competent persons examining some aspect of health and safety performance.- Site Inspections
The ultimate check on health and safety performance is to observe what is actually happening in the workplace on a typical day. The Site Inspection is a comprehensive examination of the conditions and activities throughout the site.
Each office or work area is systematically inspected, following a prepared checklist, which consists of relevant legal requirements, supplemented with requirements that are specific to the site and the activities that are being carried out.
An extension of the Site Inspection is to examine the typical working environments for off-site workers such as maintenance engineers and home workers.
The frequency of Site Inspections is determined by local circumstances but they might typically occur every six months, or perhaps annually for low risk environments. - Monthly Inspections and Checks
To establish a culture of health and safety and to ensure standards do not degrade between site inspections and audits, it is good practice for managers to conduct monthly Inspections and Checks of the areas for which they are responsible.
They may conduct the inspections themselves or delegate to suitably trained health and safety coordinators. However, the actual responsibility rests with the managers to ensure sound health and safety is being practiced.
Effective procedures should be in place to collect information and to investigate the causes of any sub-standard performance.
OHSAS 18001
The organisation needs to establish and maintain procedures to monitor and measure Occupational Health and Safety performance on a regular basis.
Procedures should provide for:
- Qualitative and quantitative measures that are appropriate for the needs of your organisation
- Monitoring the extent to which your organisation's Occupational Health and Safety objectives are being met
- Proactive measures of performance that monitor
- compliance with the Occupational Health and Safety management programme
- operational criteria
- applicable legislation and regulatory requirements
- Reactive measures of performance to monitor accidents, ill health, incidents (including near-misses) and other historical evidence of deficient Occupational Health and Safety performance
- Recording monitoring and measurement data that is sufficient to analyse the effectiveness of corrective and preventative actions.