Safety audit solutions

Environmental audits to identify and prioritize waste areas and to develop solutions to these problems. Also, health and safety audits need to be performed. 

The landfiU operators were provided with the resume and summary of the safety audit with suggestion of feasible solutions to remove existing faUures and discordances. It is fully up to the landfill operators to decide which particular solution will be selected and apphed. 

The benefits of Road Safety Audit rely on the Road Safety Auditor being able to identify genuine safety problems — features within the design that if left unaltered would actually lead to accidents. The auditor must also be able to recommend solutions that will work — based on experience of similar treatments elsewhere. 

Road Safety Audit recommendation Safety problem accepted Safety recommendation accepted Alternative solution... 

The Canadian approach to Road Safety Audits includes the traditional aspects of identifying the safety issues and also includes a subjective risk rating as well as a few suggested solutions. The subjective risk rating was requested by the recipients of the Road Safety Audits so that they could apply a priority hierarchy in addressing the issues. The inclusion of a few potential solutions was to fully utilise the expertise of the auditors who have a professional engineer on the team with expertise in road safety. 

The SaferCity Project in Gloucester in the 1990s produced Exception Reports in response to all Road Safety Audits carried out by TMS. Overall, 73% of the Road Safety Audit problems were accepted, with SaferCity either fully accepting the recommendation or implementing an alternative solution. 

The frequency and severity rates of accidents vary from country to country and from industry to industry. A number of accidents in the chemical, oil and gas, marine and nuclear industries over the years have increased the public and political pressure to improve the safety which protects people and the environment. In the evolution of the approach to safety, there has been an increasing move towards risk management in conjunction with more technical solutions. Hazardous industries have developed approaches for dealing with safety and loss prevention, from design standards to plant inspections and technical safety, through to safety auditing and human factors (Trbojevic and Soares (2000)). 

Compliance of the safety process to laws, regulations, and company policies and procedures is measured effectively by audits. Self-audits can be effective, if done with objective honesty. More than 85 percent of employers in a recent Occupational Safety and Health Administration survey said they conduct voluntary self-audits of safety and health conditions in their workplaces (HE Solutions 1999, 12). With a 60% increase over an 18-year period in the number of organizations indicating they conduct audits, nearly 90 percent of the respondents indicated they had conducted an audit in the past 12 months (HE Solutions 1999,12). Reasons for conducting these audits include the need to reduce accidents, to do what is considered right for worker safety and health, and to ensure OSHA compliance. Additional motivators for organizations to conduct audits include decreases in injury rates, improvement in insurance rates, and mitigating fines from OSHA violations. 

HE Solutions. More employers conducting safety self-audits. 31(12) 12. 

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