Worksite Hazard Analysis and Safety Audits

Maintaining a safe and health work environment requires identifying all hazards and potential hazards that exist. An effective program analyzes the work and the worksite to anticipate and prevent harmful occurrences.

At the very basic, the process of identifying potential hazards should include the following:

• A comprehensive baseline of safety and health conditions
• Periodic survey of safety and health conditions
• Analysis of planned new facilities, processes, materials and equipment
• Routine job hazard analysis where common tasks are broken into elementary components and each component assessed for hazards

Additionally, since conditions change and employees come and go conditions and operations should be continuously evaluated to ensure that the potential for injury and illness has not increased.

• There should be routine site safety and health inspections (safety and health audits)
• A reliable system for employees to notify management of apparent hazardous conditions and to receive timely and appropriate responses should be established
• Teams of employees should investigate accidents and “near misses” so that causes and means of prevention can be identified
• Injury and illness trends overtime should be reviewed so patterns with common causes can be identified and prevented

The Virtual Safety Manager (VSM) provides the basic tools for conducting a site specific worksite analysis. Included in VSM are:

• A series of questions/comments, each specific to a common hazard. If the hazard exists and an appropriate response is made, a policy applicable to the hazard is included in the Safety Policies and Procedures manual. The Safety Policies and Procedures Manual can be edited to make it site specific
• Instructions and forms for conducting job hazard analysis
• Specific audit subjects are chosen from 44 different audit subjects and scheduled for completion during a given month. The schedule is then tracked and monthly reminders provided to company employees