Do not become complacent once you have implemented a good health and safety management system. You need to continue to pursue ongoing improvement and ensure that your system remains efficient over time.
Analyse accidents and near misses
Each time an accident occurs or a worker is injured, it means your safety management system has failed. Whenever an accident or injury occur, it is important to analyse their causes and to identify corrective actions to prevent the event from recurring. Learn from your mistakes and continue to work for ongoing improvement.
Handle non-compliances and identify corrective actions
Perform regular inspections and assessments to detect any deviations from legal requirements or your internal procedures. This will enable you to take prompt action and identify preventive and correction measures.
Assess your efforts to maintain system efficiency
Measure and monitor regularly the performance of your workplace safety system and achievement of the targets set.
Analyse accidents and near misses
If an injury or accident occurs, or a potential hazard which might lead to an accident is observed, you must investigate its causes and take action to prevent the future recurrence of similar events.
Don't be tempted to ascribe the causes of all accidents to workers' behaviour: most injuries are not caused by worker carelessness but by shortcomings in the management system.
Never carry out the investigation by yourself, rely on the help of the officer responsible for the prevention and protection service (RSPP), the safety managers and all the persons concerned.
Ask yourself:
- which actions could have prevented the event happening?
- which ones are feasible?
- which ones must be implemented immediately?
- which can be scheduled in the longer term?
- who is responsible for implementation?
- do you already have the resources you need?
Prepare an action plan with the corrective measures you have identified. Indicate the person responsible for implementing each measure and the deadline for completing the activity.
At the end of your investigation, prepare an accident report, attaching maps, drawings, measurements, photographs and signed statements made by the injured person and any witnesses.
Verify personally whether the measures identified have been implemented correctly and assess their effectiveness with the help of the workers.
Handle non-compliances and identify corrective actions
It is important to set up a process to control non-compliance with legal requirements, work procedures or targets set out in your safety management plan.
You need to organise a control system which enables you to:
- organise regularly inspections and checks to identify non-compliances
- examine each non-compliance in detail and determine its causes
- identify actions to ensure the non-compliance does not occur again
- assess the effectiveness of the actions taken.
You must distinguish between:
- preventive actions - aimed at removing the cause of a potential non-compliance or other potentially undesirable situations
- corrective actions - implemented to prevent a negative event from occurring again.
Be very careful when selecting your actions: quite often, implementing a new action may reduce one risk but generate others.
Therefore you must review carefully the proposed actions and submit them too to a risk assessment process, to form a clear view of their implications.
Fill in and keep a non-compliance report for each non-compliance found.
Assess your effort to maintain the efficiency of your safety management system
You must measure and monitor regularly the performance of your health and safety management system and achievement of its set targets.
To do this you will need to perform internal audits, that is self-assessments which will enable you to measure independently and objectively the results obtained.
Every year, hold a meeting with all the company's personnel engaged in workplace risk prevention, to schedule together the days of the audits.
When scheduling the audits, take into account:
- any legal requirements
- the outcomes of prior evaluations
- any organisational or process changes.
Allocate among staff members the tasks of verifying progress of planned processes, procedures, targets or actions.
Ask each to:
- collect objective evidence (documents, certificates, reports, photographs)
- interview workers and elicit their opinion
- formulate assessments on compliance with procedures
- make recommendations for further improvement.
This will allow you to form a realistic picture of the performance of your processes and take the pulse of your management system.