Safety auditor

Little, Arthur D. 1989. The Environmental, Health and Safety Auditor s Handbook. Arthur D. Little, Inc. 

J. L. Greeno, G. S. Hedstrom, andM. DiBerto, The Environmental Health and Safety Auditors Handbook, Arthur D. Litde, Cambridge, Mass., 1988. 

Is There a Professional Certification for Sustainability Auditors There currently is no accredited, professional certification scheme specific to sustainability auditors. In the United States, the Board of Environmental, Health and Safety Auditor Certifications (BEAC)31 offers a Management Systems Certified Professional Environmental Auditor (CPEA) certification. This certification is not specific to sustainability, but does include the GRI Sustainability Reporting Guidelines in its exam for the Management Systems CPEA certification (BEAC, 2004). 

Board of Environmental, Health and Safety Auditor Certifications, Standards for the Professional Practice of Environmental, Health and Safety Auditing, 1999. Available at http //www.beac.org, March 14, 2004. 

Safety auditors should collect the following safety facilities and non-fmancial information related to the project (1) the written request for the project construction units (2) safety preassessment report (3) safety specific report and relevant documentation about project preliminary design (4) written approval of preliminary design safety fadhties of construction projects (5) the project completion report and related construction drawings (6) the safety assessment report (7) safety faciUties construction project completion and acceptance approval letter (8) technicd indicator information apphes to the audited entity s safety faciUties three simultaneous . Safety facilities "three simultaneous" can be audited by audit, supervision, observation, inquiry, confirmation, calculation, analysis and review and other conventional methods of audit. Due to the comprehensive and technology of safety audit project, safety auditors should also use cost-benefit analysis and economic evaluation of safety and other methods. 

Safety auditors should collect the following financial information relating to safety input (1) If there is safety assets (2) Safety spending does take place (3) Safety assets are owned by the audited entity (4) Structural condition of safe assets (5) Safety assets records are complete (6) The safety asset valuation is appropriate (7) Ending balance of safe assets is correct (8) Disclosure of safety assets in the accounting statements is appropriate ... 

Safety auditors should collect the following non-financial information relating to safety input (1) Enterprise safety culture and safety management activities (2) The safety awareness of employees. 

Safety audit reports are written document which the auditors compile in accordance with relevant laws and regulations in order to realize the implementation of a safety audit of the audited entity on the basis of production safety audit opinion. Safety audit report is the direct results of audit work. Safety auditors should work in accordance with the content, scope and requirements of safety audit. And the auditors should also process work papers by sorting and analysis, comprehensive, classification, analysis of audit evidence to identify problems and correct the audit opinion as well as conclusions What s more, those responsible should be asked to sign in safety audit reports. 

Functional safety auditors will determine from project or plant records whether the necessary procedures have been applied at the specified frequency by persons with the necessary competence. Auditors are not required to make judgements on the adequacy of the work they are considering. However, if they became aware that there would be benefits in making changes, then an observation should be included in the report. 

There would be no need to prioritize the recommendations for risk reduction included in an audit report if resources were unlimited and all risk reduction proposals could be scheduled for corrective action immediately. But that is never the case. A safety auditor has an obligation to assign a priority indicator to each hazard/risk situation for which a recommendation is submitted in an audit report. 

Management has a right to ask the safety auditor these questions concerning an audit report ... 

And the safety auditor should be able to give helpful responses to those questions. Too often safety auditors submit an audit report containing a laundry list of recommended actions without priority indications or an offer of assistance. Audit systems fail if they do not show an appreciation of management needs, if they are not looked upon as assisting management in attaining their goals. 

But the confidence level cannot be absolute. Unfortunately, some haz-ard/risk situations remain obscure, and perfection in identifying them cannot be attained. It should be made clear to management that applied safety auditing is based on a sampling technique and that it is patently impossible for safety auditors to identify 100% of hazard/risk situations. 

Safety coordinator Occupational hygiene coordinator Health and safety representatives Divisional safety committees Central safety committees Accident investigators Responsible engineers Internal safety auditors Fire coordinator Permit issuers... 

In the interim there had been a management change at NOSA, and I left the plant but kept in touch with their progress. NOSA had not contacted them or followed up on my initial system implementation intervention and training since my departure. I was subsequently invited back to conduct the first external audit of the plant during the December vacation in a private capacity, and my wife, also an accredited five-star safety auditor, was invited along, too. 

These rationales and assumptions are often not included in the FMEA report, but must be available for audit (by the Independent Safety Auditor) and must be kept for future reference. The customer needs to be aware of these data and may consider ensuring that its inclusion is captured in the contractual deliverable. For relative frequency of failure modes of electronic components, it is also possible to refer to Alessandro Brilini s Reliability Engineering Theory and Practice, 1997. If, however, failure rates cannot be apportioned in a justified way (i.e. from in-service experience of published data), then it should be justified by qualitative argument (see Table 3.3). 

One issue of vital inportance is to establish an early contact to the approving body and the Independent Safety Auditor (ISA) and work in close co-operation from the very beginning to avoid that safety related issues are raised very late and cause lots of additional effort. 

The book has been written by practising Road Safety Auditors, who between them have carried out over 2000 Road Safety Audits. The aim of the book will be to teach and to inform - a guide for those commissioning Road Safety Audits, those carrying out Road Safety Audits, and for those whose schemes are being audited. 

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. 

This book attempts to bring some of this information together in a format that the Road Safety Auditor can use at a practical level. The book contains many examples of real road safety problems backed up by accident statistics, together with examples of successful solutions, again backed up by comprehensive evidence. 

Requests from Road Safety Auditors that go beyond standards can lead to conflict with designers, and arbitration may be required. This is dealt with in Chapter 3. 

Experience has shown that two people carrying out a Road Safety Audit will identify more potential safety issues than a single Road Safety Auditor. The number of items to be checked, particularly on large highway schemes, can be onerous. Large numbers of detailed scheme plans may have to be examined. In addition, it is helpful to be able to discuss possible recommendations with another Road Safety Auditor. Using a Road Safety Audit Team helps to avoid the situation in which a single Road Safety Auditor can sometimes overemphasise a particular issue because of that individual s experience or even prejudice. 

HD 19/03 has specific requirements for Road Safety Auditors training and experience requirements. Three categories of Auditors are specified Team Leader, Team Member and Observer. The requirements for each category are as follows ... 

The inclusion of training and experience requirements in the Standard was welcomed by most experienced Road Safety Auditors but caused some problems in the wider Road Safety Audit community. Although the requirements are for guidance only, clients often insist on the Road Safety Auditors complying to the letter. Some smaller local authorities initially found themselves without sufficient numbers of qualified auditors but many have now achieved compliance or are working towards it. 

In addition to the formal qualifications and experience, there are other qualities needed to be a good Road Safety Auditor. These include ... 

A number of different plans and schedules often need to be reviewed for a single highway scheme. It is imperative that all plans and other information (e.g. traffic flows, accident details, scheme brief, departures from Standard) are thoroughly examined to check for possible safety problems. Items on different plans must be checked for consistency. At later stages during the Road Safety Audit process, the Road Safety Auditor should consult reports written at previous stages of the Road Safety Audit process. These may not have been written by the same Road Safety Audit Team. 

Some Road Safety Auditors use checklists describing some of the potential safety issues, but care should be taken not to be restricted by items on the checklists. A checklist should not be used as a substitute for Road Safety Engineering experience. It is sometimes the interaction between design elements that can lead to safety problems and not one element in isolation, for example a junction on a bend on a downhill section. 

Checklists are useful for new Road Safety Auditors and can be used as an aide-memoire after the Road Safety Auditor has considered the scheme from each road useds point of view. 

The inclusion of a summary of the safety problem serves to concentrate Road Safety Auditors on the road safety problems. The summary should state simply what sort of accidents might occur. If it is difficult to write this summary there is probably no road safety problem. The summary is followed by a paragraph describing how these accidents might take place and who is at risk. 

There are two possible types of comment within an Exception Report. It may be that the client accepts an identified problem but that the recommendation cannot be implemented for various reasons. In this case, the Exception Report should describe the alternative measure to be implemented. Discussion between Road Safety Auditors and designers may help to come up with suitable alternatives. 

It is important that a copy of the Exception Report or feedback form is returned to the Road Safety Audit Team. Without some form of feedback. Road Safety Auditors are working in a vacuum and will find it difficult to improve their Road Safety Audits over time. 

In this case the Road Safety Auditors will have achieved their objective — the safety issue has been addressed, albeit with a different solution. 

While the Road Safety Auditor concentrates on road safety issues, the client or design project engineer will have to weigh up the various consequences of implementing the recommendations within the Road Safety Audit Report. Generally, the project engineer will prepare an Exception Report or at least a feedback form explaining why recommendations have been rejected. However, occasionally there will be situations where decisions are very difficult and in these cases it may be necessary to introduce a system of arbitration. 

It is important for Road Safety Auditors to try to base their comments on sound road safety experience and, where possible, to have the means to back up the recommendations from documented sources. The Road Safety Audit Standard (HD 19/03) requires the road safety problem identified to be supported by background reasoning. Although detailed background reasoning is very seldom included in the report itself, the Road Safety Auditor should bear in mind that it may be necessary to justify comments in the future. 

There are a number of reasons why the Road Safety Auditor should use control data as far as is possible. 

Control data should be used to assist Road Safety Auditors with both the identification of problems and with the recommendations for improvement. In the first part, the auditor is trying to determine who is most at risk in the new layout. In the second part, the auditor tries to suggest an improvement that has been previously demonstrated to mitigate that risk. 

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