Health & Safety - Monitoring
Proactive Monitoring
These techniques include safety inspections and audits, where the objective is to obtain performance feedback, enabling corrective action to be taken prior to any failure in the system. This type of monitoring is used to evaluate the level of compliance with a legal requirement, or with a stated organisational objective.
This may involve the setting up of a health and safety group but generally risk assessments by a competent person. This must evaluate existing procedures of work and the actual methods and systems that are adopted.
The assessor must on a regular basis:
- identify hazards
- disregard inconsequential risks
- determine the likelihood of injury or harm
- quantify severity and the numbers of people who would be affected
- identify any specific legal duty or requirement relating to the hazard
The person charged with assessing health and safety must also:
- inspect the workplace and work environment
- check documentation to ensure compliance with statutory duties
- test and examine plant and machinery
- safety auditing
Reactive Monitoring
These systems are almost always limited to measurement of the extent of failure of safety management procedures.
For example:
- historical records to show the extent of lost profits arising from damaged goods, lost production time and reduced output following a safety failure
- a review of accident and injury statistics either against national averages for the same sector of employment
- a review of absence statistics
- health monitoring
- review of complaints by employees or contractors
- risk control monitoring
