Safety Management System Audit Findings

The SMS audit findings were divided between the railway operator and the regulator (Mclnerney, 2005c). Some of the major findings for the rail operator were the following  

A series of very good recommendations were developed and can be found in the investigation report cited at the end of this chapter. One additional recommendation was made that is quite interesting and unique in many systems. The commissioner demanded that an independent body be established to oversee the review of corrective action progress and implementation efficacy of both the railway operator and the regulator. This did not happen after Glenbrook and the commissioner did not want to see a repeat after Waterfall. 

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The audit team, through its systematic analysis, should document areas that require corrective action as well as where the process safety management system is effective. This provides a record of the audit procedures and findings and serves as a baseline of operation data for future audits. It will assist in determining changes or trends in future audits. 

Auditing should not be seen as a fault-finding activity. It should make a valuable contribution to the health and safety management system and to learning. It should recognize achievement as well as highlighting areas where more needs to be done. 

A safety management system assessment goes beyond just audits of safety program elements where the intent is to find only errors or problems and ignore what is being done correctly. 

The audit report should reflect the findings of the assembled evidence upon which the auditors have based the evaluation of the fire safety management system... 

The findings/outcome from audits may be used to review the frequency of audits and are input to the management review of safety instrumented systems. 

Related to the above topic of impaired information flow is the failure to respond promptly to audit findings. Audits (which are discussed in Chapter 13) are an essential part of any management system. There is always bad news to do with safety, and managers must be made aware of such news so that they can take corrective action. Failure to provide management with effective audit results can be a factor in an eventual incident. 

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