Safety and Health Management Process

The old adage that says that failure to plan is planning to fail is very appropriate when discussing the need to have a safety and health management process in place for each workplace. The term process infers action, meaning to implement and organize an approach. Such an approach must set forth a roadmap to follow, as well as the rules of the road that must be followed in order to attain a safe and healthy work environment. This organized approach to occupational safety and health must contain all the components to accomplish a process that will facilitate safety and health at the workplace. The process will include 

A commitment of a personal nature as well as resources The policies and procedures to be implemented 

The need to have such an organized approach to occupational safety and health as an integral element in the development of a safety and health initiative and program is paramount to a working safety and health management approach for each company and workplace. 

---

The major disadvantages of solvent-based adhesives, and the issues triggering their replacement, are regulatory restrictions on solvent emissions, waste disposal, and factory vapor levels. Many solvent systems are also flammable and require safety and health-management processes. 

OSHA PSM U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration Process Safety Management Chemical... 

A-l. U.S. Department of Labor, Occupational Safety and Health Administration. Process Safety Management of Highly Hazardous Chemicals. Title 29, Subtitle B, Chapter XVII, Part 1910, Subpart H, Paragraph 119, Code of Federal Regulations [29 CFR 1910.119], vol. 57, no. 36, p. 6403 Federal Register, February 24, 1992. 

Work Smart Standards Process—The Work Smart Standards (WSS) process is used to reach agreement between DOE and its contractors with regard to the applicable standards to be followed for safe woik. WSS was approved for use in January 1996 and issued as policy in DOE P 450.3, Authorizing the Use of Necessary and Sufficient for Standards-Based Environmental, Safety and Health Management. The process for applying the WSS is described in DOE M 450.3-1, The Department of Energy Closure Process for Necessary and Sufficient Sets of Standards. ... 

DeWitt, L.A., 2005. Developing, Implementing and Managing a Risk-Based Safety and Health Auditing Process. American Society of Safety Engineers. 

Operations and Safety Effectiveness Safety and Health Management Safe Work Practices Process Safety Management Contractor Safety Emergency Response... 

Therefore, Part I of this text focused primarily on the development of system safety, its military connections, the importance of including system safety requirements in contract acquisitions, the criticality of obtaining management commitment in support of the system safety effort, the process of risk analysis and assessment, probability theory and statistical analysis as they relate to system safety, and— perhaps of most value— how the fundamental principles of system safety are closely related to those of occupational safety and health management. 

US Occupational Safety and Health Administration. Process safety management. OSHA 3121. Washington, DC OSHA 2000 [reprint]. 

An Injury and Illness Prevention Program (I2P2) is a proactive process to help employers find and fix workplace hazards before workers are hurt. Over the last several decades, the safety and health community has used various names to describe approaches to reducing injuries and illnesses at the worksite. The terms safety and health management systems, accident prevention programs, and IIPP are such examples. 

Throughout the standard, the words process , processes , implemented , and continual improvement are often repeated. That is also the case in the previously cited standards on quality and environmental management. ZIO is based on a continual improvement approach. The standard outlines the processes to be put in place, not the specifics, to have an effective safety and health management system. 

In the continual improvement process, as elements in the standard are applied, information defining opportunities for further improvements in the safety and health management system, and thereby risk reduction, is to be fed back into the planning process. 

Documentation requirements of certain processes are specified in several places in ZIO. As a performance standard would do, the document and record control processes are to fit the requirements of the safety and health management systems put in place. Document retention is required to demonstrate conformance with the requirements of ZIO documents are to be accessible and forms and records are to be updated as necessary. 

This section outlines the processes to evaluate the performance of safety and health management systems and to take corrective action when shortcomings are found. Communications on lessons learned are to be fed back into the planning process. The expectation is that new objectives and action plans will be written in relation to what has been experienced. 

The purpose here is to assure that hazards, risks, and safety and health management deficiencies observed in the monitoring and measurement, audit, incident investigation, and corrective and preventive action activities are properly communicated and considered in the continual planning and management review processes. 

Another important potential function of ANSI ZIO concerns OSHA s Voluntary Protection Program (VPP). For over two decades, OSHA has approved worksites with exemplary safety and health management programs as participants in its VPP. Thus, for companies that aspire to attain VPP status, adoption of ANSI ZIO may help to jump start the application process and may foster participation by smaller companies that might otherwise be without adequate guidance on how to design... 

Initial reviews of the safety management systems in place are addressed in Section 4.1.1. In the advisory comments, this initial review is referred to as a baseline or gap analysis. Making a gap analysis in which the provisions in an existing safety and health management system are compared with the processes required by ZIO is highly recommended. 

Section 4.2 outlines the Assessment and Prioritization provisions. Processes are to be in place to assess and prioritize the occupational health and safety management issues identified in the initial and ongoing review processes. The intent is to Assess the impact on health and safety of OHSMS issues and assess the level of risk for identified hazards and to Establish priorities based on factors such as the level of risk, etc. Risk assessment and prioritization is a process that is not often found in typical safety and health management systems. 

Having written and stressed that the most effective and economical way to minimize risks is to have the hazards from which they derive addressed in the design process, I commend the drafters of ZIO for including the safety design review provisions in the standard. If it becomes the norm for employers to include these provisions in their safety and health management systems, injuries and illnesses will be substantially reduced. 

Section 6.4 of ZIO pertains to Corrective and Preventive Actions. Although requirements are set forth briefly, the importance of this section should not be minimized. To fulfill its requirements, employers are to have processes in place so that corrective actions are expeditiously taken on the deficiencies in occupational safety and health management systems inadequately controlled hazards and newly created hazards that have been identified during the monitoring process. 

The Kase and Wiese observation can be supported easily. The paramount goal of a safety and health management system audit is to have a beneficial effect on an organization s decision-making processes that determine the quality of safety obtained. 

An example of such a practical adjustment in a safety and health evaluation system may be found in OSHA s Safety and Health Management Systems eTool—Safety and Health Assessment Worksheet. In OSHA s assessment process, an entry is to be made for this item There is a written (or oral, where appropriate) policy. The implication is that, at times, an orally established safety policy is acceptable. 

Do employees support the site s participation in the VPP Process Do employees feel free to participate in the safety and health management system without fear of discrimination or reprisal ... 

Several references are made in the Report to sections in ZIO as recommended practices. Those references, and by inference the ZIO standard itself, are testimony that they represent the state-of-the-art in safety and health management systems. In the Report, the most extensive references to ZIO processes concern Management Reviews. A very large part of ZlO s Section 7.0 is quoted, close to verbatim. The following, as it appears in The Baker Report, is close to a duplicate of the shall provisions in Section 7.0. 

Both ZIO and VPP require that annual evaluations be made of the safety and health management system. ZIO also requires that processes shall be in place to conduct periodic audits. Such audits are not required by VPP. In the should column of ZIO, the following is stated Audits should be conducted by individuals independent of the activities being examined. Making independent and periodic audits is a good safety management practice. 

---