Consultancy: Safety auditing

What is Safety Auditing?

Safety auditing is a valuable management technique that is highly recommended by the Health and Safety Executive (HSE). Indeed, HSE Guidance document HSG65 “Successful Health and Safety Management” recommends that audits are undertaken annually to assist organisations to focus their resources in areas of most need. Our auditing systems can be measured against HSG65 and OHSAS 18001 as well as measuring your status against legal compliance and your own internal standards.

An audit will show exactly how you measure up to legal requirements, and whether your performance is up to standard. It will act as a benchmark from which you can form a health and safety plan.

The scope of an audit

Our auditor will examine your own management policies and procedures for securing health, safety and welfare. This is supported by a tour of inspection which will help identify areas where new policies are needed, and where existing procedures are not working effectively in practice. The audit will consider the 30 subject areas of health and safety (or as appropriate) described in the model contents list below:

We will prepare and submit a user-friendly written report that identifies where attention is needed to meet legislation or a recognised standard. It will also explain why such attention is needed. Each subject heading will have an action plan on which you can record your own targets and time-frames for addressing, and the people who are allocated with responsibility for the task.

Recommendations

Recommendations will be broken down into three categories:

Actions required to meet an actual or implied legal requirement OR Actions required to address a major non-conformity to OHSAS 18001 or other agreed standard

Actions that are good practice, and would be expected to be taken by your organisation OR Actions required to address a minor non-conformity to the OHSAS 18001 or other agreed standard

Other suggestions that, whilst not essential, may enhance the working environment and morale of employees.

Auditing to OHSAS 18001

OHSAS 18001 is an international management standard that is due to receive UKAS accreditation by late 2006 / early 2007 and will be launched as ISO 18001. The Association of British Insurers has stated that organisations who meet a recognised standard are likely to attract a healthy discount from their Employers Liability Insurance premium.

We have specially designed audit formats that can identify to what extent your health and safety management systems are meeting the specifications set in the management standard. If you are not yet meeting the standard, then we can show you where you may be going wrong.

• the extent to which you are meeting legal compliance
• the extent to which you are meeting HSE guidance and industry standards
• the remedial actions that are required, and the priorities for addressing these
• what areas of your management system need development to meet, or maintain compliance with, OHSAS 18001.

Our Specialist Audits

Some areas of employment have very specific health and safety issues, and may also have other legal standards to meet. To reduce duplication in auditing and management of these areas we have devised specialist audit formats that are unique to the industry or professions needs, thereby offering an integrated approach to management and minimising your resources.

Examples of our specialist audits include:

• Care home environment
• Motor vehicle repairers
• Call centres
• Food sector

If your organisation does not fit into any of these categories but still requires a tailor-made audit format, we would be delighted to do this for you.

Scored Audit System

Our scored audit system is specially designed for multi-site organisations who wish to measure site-by-site performance. This format can also be useful for single site organisation who wish to measure improvements to their management system year on year.

Please call us on 01622 717700for further information as to how this works.

If you would like to find out more about how PHSC can help, contact us now on 01622 717700!

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