Safety performance measurement audits

The objective in making and using an effective audit tool for the purpose of measuring safety performance is to determine the correlation between the audit, its individual items, and the safety performance measure. 

Describe the purpose of the auditing process in a safety performance measurement program. 

This list provides three examples of how audits can be implemented and used to measure safety performance. Other audits can be developed and implemented based on the needs of a school, such as access control audits or behavior-based audits to monitor for the presence of bullying among students. An audit is a flexible tool that can be used to accommodate the needs of a school. The quantitative findings can be measured across time to monitor performance and communicate the performance to faculty and staff... 

Because of the emphasis given to them in discussions with safety professionals, two performance measurement systems deserve further comment. Scheduled safety audits are performed in eveiy superior performing company. Through a formal process, they provide management with a determination that expectations are or are not being met. In that process a systems aura prevails — an aura of plan, do, check, and improve. 

Even for the large organization with significant annual hours worked, in addition to historical data, hazard-specific and qualitative performance measures (safety audits, perception surveys, the incident... 

In Chapter 24, Measurement of Safety Performance, it is said that precise and certain measures of safety, health, and enviromnental performance are difficult to obtain. Nevertheless, audits can be highly effective measures of the quality of hazards management in place if they are well conceived and well done. I suggest keeping in mind the observation made by Kase and Wiese concerning the purpose of a safety audit ... 

There are a variety of numerical scoring systems for the elements reviewed when safety audits are made. The scorings are subjective assessments that are eventually translated into a finite score. My experience has been that the final score often did not relate to the accident experience that eventually evolved. Nevertheless, safety audits, properly conducted, provide highly effective, qualitative performance measures. 

It is clear that proactive safety control is needed. Safety audits measure the management work being done to control losses, and are therefore vital performance indicators in the safety system. An audit will define what work needs to be done to improve safety and health management. 

Management usually believes that their safety performance is much better than it actually is. Auditing the safety and health system is the only positive and progressive method of measuring safety performance, and of rectifying management s misconceptions of how well they are doing in safety. 

Any simple measurement of performance in terms of injury frequency rates or incident rates is not seen as a reliable guide to the safety performance of an undertaking. The report finds there is no clear relation between such measurements and the work conditions, the injury potential, or the severity of injuries that have occurred. A need exists for more accurate measurements so that a better assessment can be made of efforts to control foreseeable risks. It is suggested that more meaningful information would be obtained from systematic inspection and auditing of physical safe guards, systems of work, rules and procedures, and training methods, than on data about injury experience alone. (HSE, 1976)... 

A safety and health audit of the work being done to control loss measures the safety system and highlights its strengths and weaknesses. The audit compares work being done, and standards being maintained, with accepted safety and health standards. It can be used to review and evaluate the performance and effectiveness of the safety system, and also to establish whether or not it meets international safety management system standards. 

More recently, safety people have applied leading, upstream, predictive, activity, preventive or process indicators or metrics to measure safety performance. This family of measures often includes safety audits, behavior-based safety measures, safety perception surveys, safety training, corrective actions completed, reductions in risk and risk factors, identifying safety and ergonomic opportunities, and other measures. Many use leading indicators to do the following ... 

Examples of leading indicators include measures of the quality of an audit program, including schedule adherence, the number of repeat injuries, and analysis of process hazard reviews. As with trailing indicators, there must be some type of cause and effect relationship established between leading indicators and safety performance. 

The development of performance measures requires a collaborative effort from various levels of the organization, as well as personnel from different departments, such as safety, environmental, finance, personnel, maintenance, and engineering. The inputs the various departments can provide include appropriate benchmark levels, validity of performance measures, data needs (such as methods for obtaining data, available data, and data collection means), audit procedures, and evaluation techniques. Input from the various departments can be useful in determining available sources so that duplication does not result in wasted time and money. 

Audit instruments can be evaluated on the basis of three different types of validity when linking the audit to safety performance. These are content-related, criterion-related, and construct-related procedures for accumulating evidence of validity (Anastasi 1988, 139). Content-related validity involves the examination of the audit content to determine whether it covers a representative sample of the behaviors to be measured. Criterion-related validity procedures indicate the effectiveness of an audit in predicting performance in specified activities. The performance on the audit is checked against a criterion that is considered a direct and independent measure of what the audit was intended to measure. The third type of validity, construct validity, is the extent to which the audit is said to be measuring a theoretical construct or trait. Construct validation requires accumulation of information from a variety of sources. 

The metric of audit scores is a proactive measurement of safety performance. Audits are used to measure the safety performance of a school against established organizational standards or government regulations. Questions are asked related to each aspect of a safety program being audited. The responses to these questions on the audit are then translated into a score that can serve as the metric that is used to measure performance. Types of safety audits cau include ... 

What types of audits would be useful in measuring safety performance at a school ... 

To assess the safety performance of the equipment and the safety managanent system itself by measurement and audit ... 

Where management have not drawn up a safety plan, counting accidents is the only measure of safety performance available, apart, of course, from auditing compliance with statutory hardware requirements. This is a reason why safety management via accident rate comparison is attractive to the less competent and committed employer. 

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