Element 4 Flashcards
Active and Reactive Monitoring? (Definitions)
• Active monitoring – checking to ensure that health and safety
standards are correct in the workplace before accidents, incidents, or ill
health are caused.
• Reactive monitoring – using accidents, incidents and ill health as
indicators of performance to highlight areas of concern.
Inspection, Sampling and Tours?
Safety Inspections
The term ‘safety inspection’ implies an examination of the workplace
and working conditions so that comparisons can be made to expected
performance standards (whether in-house or a statutory standard).
Safety Sampling:
This is the technique of monitoring conformance with a particular workplace standard by looking at a representative
sample only. If a big enough sample is collected, then there is a strong likelihood that the results of the sample will
reflect the results for the workplace as a whole.
Safety Tours
A safety tour is a high-profile inspection of a workplace carried out by a
group or team, including managers. The tour may be formal, but can also be
informal – a walk-around looking at points of interest (usually unscheduled).
The group carrying out the tour should include the manager of the area
being inspected and possibly a worker or worker representative, a health and
safety specialist, an occupational health specialist and perhaps an engineer.
Ideally the group would also include a senior manager (such as a senior
operations manager or director).
Accident, Near Miss, Dangerous Occurence, Work Related Ill health? (Definitions)
ACCIDENT
An unplanned, unwanted event which leads to injury, damage or loss.
NEAR MISS
An unplanned, unwanted event that had the potential to lead to injury, damage or loss, but did not, in fact,
do so.
DANGEROUS OCCURRENCE
A specified event that has to be reported to the relevant authority by statute law.
WORK-RELATED ILL HEALTH
Diseases or medical conditions caused by a person’s work
Steps Of Investigation?
• Step 1: Gather factual information about the event.
• Step 2: Analyse that information and draw conclusions about the immediate and root causes.
• Step 3: Identify suitable control measures.
• Step 4: Plan the remedial actions.
Recording and Reporting?
REPORTING
The process of informing people that an incident has occurred – this can be internally within the organisation
or externally to enforcing authorities or insurers, etc.
RECORDING
The process of documenting the event.
Audit? (Definition)
Auditing is the systematic, objective, critical evaluation of an organisation’s health and safety management
system.
• Systematic – the audit follows a series of logical steps and stages and
follows a prepared plan.
• Objective – all findings are evidence-based.
• Critical – it highlights areas of non-compliance or non-conformance.
Difference between Audit and Inspection?
An inspection is a simpler process of checking the workplace for uncontrolled hazards and addressing any that are
found.
It is important that the term ‘audit’ is used correctly; an audit is the thorough examination of the management
system, from the documents through to what is happening in practice in the workplace.
For example, we might inspect the fire extinguishers in a building to verify that they are where they should be,
correctly signed, labelled with an in-date inspection, tagged and pinned.
But we can audit the fire extinguisher management system for a site to verify that:
• There is an adequate policy on fire extinguishers.
• Annual extinguisher maintenance records are complete and up-to-date.
• Weekly extinguisher visual inspections are being done and recorded.
• Training records on extinguisher use are kept and are complete and up-to-date.
• Incident reports are created and kept of any event requiring the use of fire extinguishers.
• Workers appear to understand how to use fire extinguishers correctly.
• The fire extinguishers are in the correct location and are labelled, tagged and pinned as expected.
Audit Stages?
- Pre Audit preparation
- During the Audit
- At the end of the Audit
