System Safety Reviews and Audits

The other piece of the closed loop is periodic review of the system safety process. This is the fine-tuning of the system safety program and review at the macroscopic level and should be conducted by an independent safety group to avoid conflict of interest. This is precisely why the system safety office should report directly to the corporate office. The purpose of the review and audit is to verify that the system safety program is in place, performs its intended function, and adequately protects employees, consumers, and the eompany against accidents and other losses. It also serves as a documentation trail for OSHA inspectors, showing that your organization takes safety seriously. 

Every time a major change in the system or operational mode occurs, the system SMS should be reviewed to ensure that risks are properly addressed and identified. And make sure that through the closed-loop process, all lessons learned from accident investigations, hazard control verifications, and other learning are fed back into the SMS—thus ensuring a self-learning SMS. 

The audit should match system safety performance with the SSPP and SMS, verify the success with which risk to people and property is identified and controlled, and verify to what depth the system safety proeess influences project and corporate decisions. 

Audits should be conducted by a team of specialists from a variety of fields, such as process engineering, safety, environmental, maintenance, operations and 

Audit Description Hndings Corrective Action Tracking  

---