General Design Safety Checklist

For these reviews, a specifically tailored Vendor/Design Engineering Review Form is to be created from sections of the General Design Safety Checklist appropriate to the task. Reports must be made available to the Safety Review Team and Project Manager. 

The example of an Equipment Acceptance-Safety Review Form shown in Figure 1 assumes the existence of a General Design Safety Checklist that can serve as a foundation for the review process. Also, the example presumes two levels of review a preliminary review to identify items needing attention and a final sign-off. 

A detailed, specifically referenced design checklist covering all workplace safety needs would fill thousands of pages. The General Design Safety Checklist presented here is a brief composite derived from several sources. Some safety professionals will view it as excessive others will find that it does not address all their needs. Those who use it as a reference should be aware that there are many subject-specific and industry-specific checklists to which they should also refer. For example ... 

This General Design Safety Checklist is intentionally presented as a list of questions without the separating boxes and lines typical of most checklists. Also, the cus-tomay boxes to the right of a design checklist where users would enter checkmarks for yes, no, and not applicable have been eliminated. 

Checklists are easy to use and provide a cost-effective way to identify customarily recognized hazards. Nevertheless, the quality of checklists is dependent on the experience of the people who develop them. Furthermore, they must be crafted to suit particular needs. If a checklist is not complete, the analysis may not identify some hazardous situations. An example of a checklist for machinery design is provided in Addendum B at the end of this chapter. A checklist for general design purposes appears in Chapter 13, Safety Design Reviews. Both serve as resources for those who choose to build their own checklists. 

You generally want the items to be mutually exclusive so that your observers are less likely to make errors when recording their observations on checklists. For instance, you may not want checklist items to include both wearing appropriate protective equipmait and wearing safety glasses in designated areas. This would create confusion for observers and would make observation data less reliable. 

A team of seven workers from three different field crew locations and the district manager designed the safety process. They created a checklist that worked for all of the field groups and an additional one for clerical and office settings. The field checklist included items relating to body position, line of fire, general work conditions, and vehicle safety. 

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