An Occupational Safety Management Program

Occupational safety management should take a comprehensive approach. Occupational safety management is a broad field of management related to loss prevention, physical and logical controls, occupational safety, and asset protection functions. It entails the identification of an organization s employees, physical assets, and intangible assets and the development, documentation, and implanentation of physical measures, policies, procedures, and guidelines. 

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Chapter 2 explores the fundamentals of critical thinking and analysis. Managers must be ready to analyze problems and understand how information is influenced by bias and perceptions, even manipulation. Chapter 3 examines the core competencies of the occupational safety manager. Chapter 4 tells us how to build an occupational safety management program. The remaining chapters are as follows ... 

This book was developed to provide safety and health professionals, students, and employers with the basic tenets for the creation of an occupational safety and health initiative for those responsible or planning to implement and manage safety and health programs for their companies or future employers. The intent of this book is to provide a management blueprint for occupational safety and health for the smallest to the largest companies who are beginning to or have seen the need to develop or improve their safety and health approach in their workplace. This would include the construction industry as well as other industrial groups. 

Occupational safety managers use tools such as risk assessments, criticality and vulnerability studies, return on program investment analyses, and cost-benefit analyses to gain an understanding of loss environments. In itself, the comprehensive process of risk analysis utilizes a process of critical thinking. However, the... 

After the occupational safety manager chooses a methodical framework to institute a comprehensive safety management program, the standards of safety that are required to make an organization safe can be applied. This is where safe-workplace laws... 

The occupational safety and health community uses various names to describe systematic approaches to reducing injuries and illnesses in the workplace. Consensus and international standards use the term Occupational Health and Safety Management Systems OSHA currently uses the term Injury and Illness Prevention Programs and others use Safety and Health Programs to describe these types of systems. Regardless of the title, they all systematically address workplace safety and health hazards on an ongoing basis to reduce the extent and severity of work-related injuries and illnesses. 

Risk management programs can be divided into two broad categories prescriptive and nonprescrip-tive. Prescriptive standards, in which a set of detailed standards are developed, usually by a regulator or industry standards-setting body, are what most people think of when safety is discussed, are often associated with traditional occupational safety standards. To pick an example almost at random, OSHA has the following rule to do with ladders ... 

In other words, an audit compares what is with what should be. A management program is measured against an external standard such as a regulation or corporate benchmark. It is fundamentally a pass/fail test. For example, paragraph 1910.119(a)(1) of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) Process Safety Standard states that ... 

Members of the ZIO committee have said that the draft document to be submitted for public comment in the normal course of standard development will be representative of what has been learned about good safety management, and will be somewhat beyond the safety management guidelines issued in previous years that were then considered acceptable. An example of such previous issuances are the Safety and Health Program Management Guidelines published by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) in 1989. 

OSHA (Occupational Safety and Health Admlnlstration)-mandated safety program is compared to a proactive safety program driven by lean thinking and tools. Learn about the value of a proactive program that engages employees in the continuous improvement of safety as seen from the eyes of a manager, a lean champion, and an hourly employee. 

A good guideline for what elements a safety management system should contain is the American National Standards Institute (ANSI), ANSI/AIHA ZlO-2005 American National Standard Occupational Health and Safety Management Systems. A similar standard exists for the construction and demolition industry ANSI/ASSE AlO.38-2000 (R2007) Basic Elements of an Employer s Program to Provide a Safe and Healthful Work Environment. 

An audit check performed prior to equipment operation to ensure that adequate Process Safety Management (PSM) activities have been performed. The check should verify that (1) construction and equipment are satisfactory, (2) procedures are available and adequate, (3) a Process Hazard Analysis (PHA) has been undertaken and recommendations resolved, and (4) the employees are trained. It is part of the requirements of the PSM program outlined in the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) regulation 29 CFR 1910.119. 

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