Tools for a Safety and Health Program Assessment

Construction Safety and Health Outreach Program U.S. Department of Labor OSHA Office of Training and Education May 1996 

There are three basic methods for assessing safety and health program effectiveness. This discussion will explain each of them. It also will provide more detailed information on how to use these tools to evaluate each element and subsidiary component of a safety and health program. The three basic methods for assessing safety and health program effectiveness are  

Some elements of the safety and health program are best assessed using one of these methods. Others lend themselves to assessment by two or all three methods. 

Checking documentation is a standard audit technique. It is particularly useful for understanding whether the tracking of hazards to correction is effective. It can also be used to determine the quality of certain activities, such as self-inspections or routine hazard analysis. 

If certain hazards recur repeatedly after being corrected, someone is not taking responsibility for keeping those hazards under control. Either the responsibility is not clear, or those who are responsible are not being held accountable. 

Interviewing employees at all levels for knowledge, awareness, and perceptions 

Reviewing site conditions and, where hazards are found, finding the weaknesses in management systans that allowed the hazards to occur or to be uncontrolled  

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Appendix B Tools for a Safety and Health Program Assessment 275... 

The other program mentioned in this section of Act is The Healthy School Environments Assessment Tool (HealthySEATv2). It was adapted from a database tool originally developed by the Los Angeles Unified School District to conduct self-assessment inspections in its approximately nine hundred school facilities and substantially modified by EPA to make it widely available to the more than fourteen thousand school districts nationwide. It is free software that can be customized and helps school districts evaluate and manage their school facilities for key environmental, safety, and health issues. EPA has also included critical elements of all of its regulatory and voluntary... 

Measurements that assess the extent of exposure can be important tools in a laboratory safety program. Air sampling has long served as an aid to occupational safety and health professionals who seek to ensiue that chemical exposures are minimized. As biomonitoring continues with improved methods and builds a substantial mass of data to aid in interpretation, it will become a very significant technique for assessing exposure to chemicals. The utility of these techniques is illustrated in Special Topic 6.3.1.1. 

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