Safety Auditing: A Management Tool

The paramount goal of a safety audit is to influence favorably the organization s culture. Kase and Wiese concluded properly in Safety Auditing A Management Tool that ... 

Kase, Donald W. and Kay J. Wiese. Safety Auditing A Management Tool. New York John Wiley Sons, 1990. 

Throughout this book, I have emphasized that safety is culture driven. Results achieved with respect to safety and health are a direct reflection of an organization s culture. In Safety Auditing A Management Tool, Donald W. Kase and Kay J. Wiese state early in a chapter titled Successful Auditing that ... 

Kase and Wiese (1990) expressed a view in Safety Auditing A Management Tool about the outcome to be expected from an auditing program that is not expressed elsewhere ... 

Internal safety system audits should take place every 6 months by a trained team of internal accredited auditors. The audit is not merely a safety inspection. A safety audit provides the means for a systematic analysis of each elanent of a loss prevention program to determine the extent and quality of the controls. It is a critical examination of all, or part, of a total safety operating system, and it is a management tool that measures the overall operating effectiveness of a company s safety and health program. 

An audit is a management tool that measures the overall operating effectiveness of a company s safety and health system. 

Although reviewing the OSHA log is a good tool for auditing a management system, it is only one of many tools that can be used. Such an approach takes only a proactive look at the management system once a safety issue has occurred. Ideally, a company should try to be proactive in their approach [9]. 

The effective audit will uncover any weakness or noncompliance in the safety-related areas that are being audited. Audits typically get a score, whereas inspections usually do not. Audits are more of a management tool to determine compliance in a general way. Inspections are a tool used by all levels to determine compliance in a specific area (typically and most often physical safety hazards). Management has been baffled when safety inspections continually reveal no deficiencies, yet accident occurrences seem to be prevalent. The use of a comprehensive audit can help eliminate accident occurrences. 

The hazard log is not a safety assessment or hazard identification technique, only a management tool that is subservient to the safety management system. In fact, the hazard log can be thought of as an index to the mass of information held in the safety case. As such, the hazard log is a live document, which throughout the hfe of the product/facUity/operation provides an auditable record of the management of hazards. 

More generally, risk assessment has become increasingly weighty both at the level of national policy decisions and also locally. Local managers are expected to think in terms of risk assessment. Health and safety auditing has also emerged as a key tool in the management of occupational health and safety risks. 

The European Directive 2008/96/CE requires member states to establish and implement procedures related to road safety impact assessments, road safely audits, the management of road network safety and safety inspections. In the Directive, great emphasis is given to road Safety Inspections (SI) as an effective tool for the safety management of existing toads stating Once road sections with a high accident concentration have been treated and remedial measures have been taken, safety inspections as a preventive measnre should assume a more important role. 

Auditing enables management to ensure that their policy is being carried out and that it is having the desired effect. Auditing complements the monitoring prr ramme. Economic auditing of a company is well established as a tool to ensure economic stability and it has been shown that similar systematic evaluation of safety performance has equal benefits. 

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