Inertia Safety Limited

Safety Management Systems - Check


Measuring and monitoring performance

With all of the other activities that need doing in a health and safety management system it can sometimes become difficult to see the wood for the trees.  You should focus on the fact that the point of the management system is to encourage continual improvement in health and safety performance.  To achieve this some measurement needs to be put into place.

The types of measures that you choose will depend on the maturity of the management system.  Initially the focus of the management system should be on compliance.  As the system matures the focus shifts to finding opportunities for improvement in the policies and procedures.  Finally, the emphasis shifts again and individual work groups start to select their own measures which should derive the greatest improvements in their areas of control.

To find out more about performance measuring follow this link to the HSE website - http://www.hse.gov.uk/opsunit/perfmeas.pdf

To find out more about selecting indicators follow this link to the step change in safety website - http://www.stepchangeinsafety.net/knowledgecentre/publications/publication.cfm/publicationid/26


Evaluating compliance

You can link the hazards that were found in the "Planning" section earlier to general and specific health and safety legislation.  This list of legislation is what your safety management system needs to comply with.  You can use HSE guidance and approved codes of practice to review whether you are doing enough to met the requirements of this legislation.

A list of UK health and safety legislation can be found by following this link:  http://www.hse.gov.uk/legislation/


Investigating incidents

When things go wrong at work and someone is injured your safety management system should be designed to investigate these occurrences.  You need to establish what happened and look for ways to improve the safety management system in order to avoid re-occurrence. 

Near misses should also be recorded and investigated in much the same way as incidents where people were injured.


Internal Audits

This is a systematic review of the safety management system against its requirements (that were defined in the "Plan" section of the system).  A good auditing system will look for evidence of whether the system is achieving the requirements as well as noting any opportunities for improvement.  


To move on to the "Act" section of safety management systems CLICK HERE


To go back to the introduction to management systems CLICK HERE