Health and Safety Management System

It is well understood that organisations have both a legal and moral obligation to manage the health and safety of its employees (and anyone else that they might affect) but how can we make sure that we do enough to avoid falling short of these requirements?

Health and Safety Management System
As with most aspects of managing businesses, what is required for the management of health and safety is a systematic approach. Something that helps to deliver our health and safety policy, identifies whether we’re doing enough in terms of health and safety and ensures that we are giving our employees the protection that they deserve and are entitled to. If our systematic approach leads to improved efficiencies and gives our organisation a competitive edge, then all the better. In short what we need is an Occupational Health and Safety Management System.

There are a range of well proven Management Standards, which provide the framework for the development of organisations’ management systems, including Health and Safety Management Systems. Such Standards include the OHSAS 18001 Occupational Health and Safety Management Standard and HSG65, the HSE’s approach to the management of health and safety.

Organisations can elect to be assessed against any Standard that they choose but not all Standards are certifiable. The only standard that aligns with other international Management Standards is OHSAS 18001 so if you are looking for a certifiable standard then this may be the one for you. If you have no intention of certifying your Health and Safety Management System, either now or in the future, then the HSE’s HSG65 provides a completely free set of guidelines. OHSAS 18001 can of course be implemented without any need for certification. The advantage of using the OHSAS 18001 Standard is that if your organisation changes its mind about certification in the future you will already have a Health and Safety Management System that is in compliance with the certifiable Standard.

If your organisation utilises other Management Systems such as an ISO Quality Management System or an ISO Environmental Management System then an Occupational Health and Safety Management System based on the OHSAS 18001 Standard would likely be advantageous to you. The more Standards that are employed within an organisation, the less amount of additional work is required to fulfil the requirements of each individual Standard. Much of what we do to control our products we often repeat in the interest of controlling our environmental impact or our health and safety incidents. By using a Health and Safety Management System that integrates with these other Standards we can reduce much of this repetition.

The Benefits of Having a Health and Safety Management System
It is important that you develop a Health and Safety Management System that fits in with what you do and the way in which you do it. Off the shelf solutions rarely achieve this without significant modifications. The right system will help you to control the management of your health and safety in a systematic way. It will help in identifying problems and finding solutions, in reducing risk levels and improving legal compliance. Other potential benefits include:

• Cost savings through incident and accident reduction
• Improved worker morale
• Reduced insurance premiums
• Better access to capital and the marketplace
• Increased profits through improved efficiencies
• Improve public relations
• Demonstrates to the authorities and others that you are taking responsibility for the management of your health and safety

The application of Health and Safety Management Systems is well proven to help organisations in realising all of these benefits but there are several reasons that some organisations never see all or any of these benefits and they include:

• Adoption of a Standard that does not assist with the achievement of the organisations goals (the wrong Standard)
• Using a Health and Safety Management System that does not match the organisations objectives and needs
• Buying in a solution for the sake of a certificate
• Failing to communicate the system including the organisations policy and procedures
• A lack of information, instruction and training

Using Your Health and Safety Management System
Most Management Systems, including Health and Safety Management Systems are based on the principles of Plan, Do, Check, Act as follows:

Plan
Identify the key legal requirements and industry best practice that pertain to your organisation and formulate plans that will enable you to comply with them.

Establish a policy which reflects the expectations of management and stakeholders and includes a top level management commitment to the management of health and safety. Your policy should state your objectives and what arrangements you have put in place to achieve them. If this is your first step into managing your health and safety your initial objectives may be to establish how you have been performing so far so that you can identify what needs your attention first.

Your health and safety policy cannot be written and put to bed. It should be a living document with ever changing objectives as you continually improve your health and safety provisions. Your policy must be effectively communicated and to achieve this you may need to produce it in a number of formats. Pinning a copy on the notice board will not ensure that it is read or understood. You should monitor the understanding and effectiveness of your policy through audits.

The risk assessment process is key to managing health and safety. You will need to identify all of your work tasks and risk assess any that present any significant hazards. The outcomes from these assessments will help you to plan what needs to be done and which activities need to be dealt with as a priority.

Before putting your plan into action you will need to organise who will be responsible for what. Everyone has responsibility for health and safety so no one should be excluded from the communication of your organisation. Where contractor relationships exist you may need to establish who will be responsible for co-ordination in the interest of health and safety, you may need to appoint someone to manage the safety of your premises or equipment and machinery. Some organisations are obliged to implement a health and safety committee, for others it’s just a good idea.

Do
Now you implement your plan. Take the outcomes from your risk assessments and put them into place e.g. affix safety guards where they are needed, install barriers, put your Safe Systems of Work in place and issue PPE where it is required etc. You may find that certain activities need to be controlled through the provision of written procedures.

Check
There are a number of ways in which we can measure the success of our health and safety provisions. Informal safety tours by representatives or management safety tours can provide a relaxed approach for the day to day checks your Health and Safety Management System’s performance. Safety audits and inspections provide a more structured means of measurement and they can be used to check whole work processes or specific inputs such as the maintenance and condition of a particular piece of equipment. The best way to check on how we are doing is to use a variety of measurement techniques. All checks, no matter how informal, should be recorded.

Act
Having put new controls into place during the ‘Do’ phase, it is unlikely that everything will be perfect. This is where we act on our findings. Management will need to investigate why things have not gone according to plan and identify any failings. You may need to provide better equipment, to provide training or to amend your Safe Systems of Work / procedures. By analysing the outcome of your measuring activities management can also identify where opportunities exist for improvement of your Health and Safety Management System. Continual improvement is a fundamental requirement of Management Systems. The outcome from the ‘Act’ phase is fed back into the ‘Plan’ phase where you plan how you will improve and so the cycle goes on.

Getting Health and Safety Management Systems Right
The full time employment of a Health and Safety expert is an excessive cost for many organisations, not to mention employing a management systems specialist but without the right level of knowledge it is unlikely that organisations will get the most from the management of their health and safety provisions. Here at Lynwood we have specialists who can help with your HSG65 or OHSAS 18001 based Health and Safety Management System. They are also certified health and safety practitioners. Give us a call to arrange your free of charge, no obligation initial consultation.