Safety management system action plan

Advisory comments on incident investigation are more extensive. They indicate that incidents should be viewed as possible symptoms of problems in the occupational health and safety management system the goal is to identify and correct hazards and system deficiencies before incidents occur experience shows that incident investigations should be commenced as soon as practical and lessons learned from investigations are to be fed back into the planning and corrective action processes. 

Rather than relying solely on these after-the-event measures, an audit provides a before-the-fact measure of control activities. A more valid comparison from year-to-year or site-to-site becomes possible. All elements of the plan, or the health and safety management system, can be critically reviewed so that priorities for future action may be determined. 

The JHA is one component of an overall strategy. The facility needs to understand other components of a safety management system that can affect the quality of the job procedures. A program should be developed to evaluate whether employees are consistently following documented procedures. The action planning process is the preferred method to help accomplish this goal. 

This chapter provides a brief summary of the root cause analysis process and will help you understand and conduct successful incident investigations. Incident investigation is an important element in an effective safety management system. The basic reason for investigating and reporting the causes of occurrences is to identify action plans to prevent recurrence of incidents. 

The structured process of collecting independent information on the efficiency, effectiveness and reliability of the total health and safety management system and drawing up plans for corrective action. 

A school may already have an existing emergency action plan within the scope of a health and safety management system. Much, if not all, of such a program can be directly integrated into the academic continuity plan in the emergency response and crisis managanent phases. 

Refer to Appendix V, Example Safety Management System Assessment and Action Plan for an example outline that provides the various activities that might be included in the assessment of a safety management system. It follows a strategy, measurement, treatment outline to establish how the assessment would be organized, the metrics required, and how hazards and associated risk would be treated. 

This example is based on the ANSI ZlO-2012 content (Occupational Health and Safety Systems, 2012) to show how an assessment could follow any selected safety management system to ensure that all of its components are reviewed. With this example, you will note the shift from reviewing elements to implementing specific actions. This was done to emphasize that the assessment may identify areas that must receive immediate action, and planning should consider that this may occur. 

Appendix V Example Safety Management System Assessment and Action Plan... 

All chemical companies will have a person, or group of people, depending on their size, directly responsible for health, safety and environment (HSE) and for regulatory affairs. All model HSE management systems consist of a Plan, Do, Check and Review cycle as illustrated in Figure B13 [B-20]. The Check and Review stages enable any necessary corrective actions to be taken. 

OSHA deals with fire protection from an employee safety standpoint, and many of the points covered in the OSHA standard are solid management practices for property safety as well. Subpart E, Means of Egress, is taken from NFPA 101-1970, the Life Safety Code. The emphasis of this subpart is on protecting the employee once a fire has started. It informs the employer what to do to protect workers during the fire by addressing egress methods, automatic sprinkler systems, fire alarms, emergency action plans, and fire prevention plans. 

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. 

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