Page 32 - Occupational Health & Safety, June 2017

SAFETY MANAGEMENT
Why Do Safety Inspections?
Work site safety inspections can be a vital part of your injury prevention efforts if done well.
Plan
Study
BY CARY USREY
Most companies conduct periodic work site safety inspections. This process is part of the traditional landscape of a comprehensive health and safety plan.
At regular intervals, someone within the organization sets out to critically observe in an effort to identify and rectify hazards. But why are they done? Therein lies the interesting question.
“Because we have to.”
Safety is often driven by compliance—either to a regulation or a company policy. Certainly compli- ance is a factor and one that is often developed with a specific purpose in mind. OSHA has a clear im- perative that employers are required to provide their employees with a place of employment that “is free from recognizable hazards that are causing or likely to cause death or serious harm to employees.” Work site inspections serve as the vehicle to record hazards and document abatement.
As the saying goes—if it’s not documented, it didn’t happen. With that in mind, can companies meet the regulatory requirement by simply walking about ev- ery once in a while and fix what is found? Perhaps. While this satisfies a basic requirement, simply walk- ing around and checking a box does not necessarily offer assurance that the workplace is free of recogniz- able hazards and meet the spirit and intent of the pur- pose the regulation is trying to express.
“Because we care.”
Conducting workplace safety inspections can serve a greater purpose than simply meeting a compli- ance requirement. In fact, work site safety inspections can be a vital part of your injury prevention efforts if done well. They can help reassusure workers that the workplace is safe and help the company demonstrate that it cares. In order for this to happen, a more robust process is necessary. The best methodology for this process is also one that is time tested and rooted in continuous improvement—the Deming cycle.
■ Plan
- Define the purpose and set expectations.
■ Do
- Define an inspection strategy, collect obser-
vations, and perform the initial correction.
■ Study
- Periodically review data collected; identify
gaps and trends.
■ Act
- Give feedback, develop action plans, and
make data-driven decisions.
Let’s break this down by component:
Act
Do
28 Occupational Health & Safety | JUNE 2017
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Plan
The purpose of conducting work site safety inspections should be more than mere compliance. The purpose should be to prevent injuries. With that in mind, the expectations should be that inspections that detail criti- cal observations of all areas should be conducted at a frequency that allows for sufficient trending of patterns.
With the expanded purpose and expectations, it may become clear that the frequency and breadth of current inspections is insufficient and may need to be expanded in order to meet the new requirements. In addition, a plan must be put in place to actually use the data collected, beyond checking the box and counting the “cards” submitted. Tracking and trend- ing of findings is essential to meet the revised purpose of injury prevention.
Lastly, the planning elements must be communi- cated to everyone so that the purpose is clear.
Do
The first step in this phase is the development of a comprehensive inspection strategy. This strategy should define who does inspections, when they occur, what is to be observed, and where it to be done.
■ Who does inspections? A study was conduct- ed that shows the probability of having an incident declines as the number and diversity of the people performing inspections increases. In fact, the study shows that having a large number of diverse inspec- tors doing a few inspections each is better than having a few inspectors doing a large number of inspections each, even if those inspectors are highly trained safety professionals. This inclusion helps to shift the owner- ship of safety away from the “safety” team and onto the entire organization.
■ When do they occur? An inspection is a snap- shot in time. As the saying goes, if a tree falls in the woods and nobody is there to hear it, does it make a sound? The same goes for safety inspections—if work occurs and there is nobody to evaluate it critically for safety, was the work done safely? It is best to schedule
PREDICTIVE SOLUTIONS