Safety consciousness tends to slip over time - and it's your responsibility to make sure that this doesn't happen. A well-prepared and well-executed safety audit/inspection program can play a key role in your risk management by uncovering conditions and work practices that could lead to job accidents and industrial illnesses.
Stated more positively, this means checking to see that things are in good shape. In addition to help preventing accidents, the inspection program will keep management informed about the "safety status" of your organization, provide a consistent method of recording observations, and reduce the possibility of important items being overlooked.
Safety inspection tours are like preventive maintenance. Every piece of equipment wears down and deteriorates sooner or later, and needs to be checked. Similarly, employee work procedures fall into routines - some of them unsafe - over time, which means that you need to evaluate them at regular intervals.
Safety inspections have a number of objectives:
- Spotlighting unsafe conditions and equipment.
- Focusing on unsafe work practices or behavior trends before they lead to injuries.
- Uncovering the need for new safeguards.
- Getting all employees to buy in to the safety program.
- Re-evaluating the safety standards of the organization.
- Comparing safety results against safety plans.
- Gauging the relative success of safety training efforts.
- Anticipating problems in advance of any OSHA inspection.
Our agency's risk management professionals would be happy to work with you on developing and implementing a comprehensive safety inspection program for your business. Feel free to get in touch with us at any time.