Safety systems/method statements

Comply with any Method Statement or safe system introduced for his or her health and safety ... 

This involves making sure that employees are fully aware of company policy, risk assessments, method statements, safety procedures, good practice, official guidance, any test results and legal requirements. This is sometimes known as a Safe Person approach to controlling risks where the focus is on individuals. A properly set up health and safety management system should cover and balance both a Safe Place and Safe Person approach. 

It follows from this that the use of safe systems of work is in no way a replacement for other precautions, such as good equipment design, safe construction and the use of physical safeguards. However, there are many situations where these will not give adequate protection in themselves, and then a carefully thought-out and properly implemented safe system of work is especially important. This is usually call a health and safety method statement (or method statement for short). 

Method statements (see Chapter 6) should be developed at this stage. They will detail how a specific job or process is to be undertaken together with the associated hazards and the necessary control measures that should be in place to ensure health and safety. If contractors are to be used, a pre-tender questionnaire should be submitted by them so that their competence may be determined. The method statement should be checked and approved by the employer or a responsible person, such as the site manager or supervisor, before the work starts. When the work has started, the employer is obliged, under Section 3 of the Health and Safety at Work Act, to ensure adherence to the method statement and that a safe system of work is being used while the work is being undertaken. 

Some principal and management contractors impose their own stricter requirements concerning the production of method statements - the trend is to require them for all activities. They are entitled to do so if they wish, as compliance with the safety management system will be a condition of the contract. Most principal contractors are prepared to assist smaller organisations to prepare their method statements. 

Safe systems of work are often documented in the form of method statements, or formalised into permit-to-work systems. Some safe systems can be verbal only - where Instructions are given on the hazards and the means of dealing with them, for short duration tasks. These instructions must be given by supervisors or managers, because leaving workers to devise their own method of work is not a safe system of work. A more formal analysis may be required, and the result can be used to train new workers in the required method. This technique is called job safety analysis, and is discussed elsewhere. 

In order to comply with section 2(2) of the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974 in relation to the provision of a safe system of work, the production of a method statement is recognised as necessary for all demolition work. Because of the special demolition needs of each structure, an individual risk assessment must be made by the employer undertaking the work, in writing, to comply with the Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations 1999. 

Codes, rules and procedures (including, for example, method statements, safety instractions, permits to work, safe working practices etc.) are, in effect, the instruction mannals of the Safety Management System. Like instraction manuals in everyday life they range from totally invaluable to completely useless. 

Planning in accordance with the Policy in order to reduce risks by means of risk assessment, planned safety systems of work, method statements and training, is carried out at pre-tender and contract phases. Four weekly safety meetings allow Health Safety issues to be fully considered outside of commercial constraints. 

The basic concept of the aforementioned chapters 5, 6, 9 and 10 is to provide techniques and measines that can be used to improve safety of a system that has to be developed. Some methods are complemented with statements about the usefulness of certain methods and techniques, e.g. Such feedback should be analyzed to ensure that any failure to operate a safety function is investigated . There is no direct connection between the overall set of methods and the set of methods that is recommended to be used for a specific SSCI level. 

These statements appear in the Abstract MORT is a comprehensive analytical procedure that provides a disciplined method for determining the causes and contributing factors of major accidents. Alternatively, it serves as a tool to evaluate the quality of an existing [safety management] system. This MORT User s Manual is a 57-page paper issued in 1992. The concepts on which MORT is built have staying power, as is evidenced by the following reference puhhshed a decade later. 

In 2010, the American Society of Safety Engineers sponsored a symposium titled Rethink Safety A New View of Human Error and Workplace Safety. Several speakers proposed that the first course of action to prevent human errors is to examine the design of the work system and work methods. Those statements support Deming s 85-15 rule. Consider this statement by a human error specialist [from this author s notes] ... 

It follows from the given statement that there exists interconnectivity of the fields of safety and security with the methods of technical diagnostics that protect people not only in the OHS area or technical safety, that is, within the working environment, but also outside the working environment as a part of civil security, and the methods as such constitute a complex protection system that needs to be further improved and developed to minimize complex risks. 

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