What is a Safety Audit?
Safety audits are a method of monitoring your organisations health and safety performance. They are a systematic analysis of your organisations workplace activities and documentation against health and safety law and the requirements of your accrediting bodies. They provide a snapshot of whether your business is meeting these requirements and where action needs to be taken to correct any shortcomings. They are also a great way of identifying opportunities for improvement with the management of your health and safety, as well as any good practices which could be applied more broadly throughout your business.

Are Safety Audits A Legal Requirement?

Yes and no.  The Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulation 1999 states:

5.—”(1) Every employer shall make and give effect to such arrangements as are appropriate, having regard to the nature of his activities and the size of his undertaking, for the effective planning, organisation, control, monitoring and review of the preventive and protective measures.”

They key element of this requirement in relation to audits, is the requirement to monitor the arrangements you put in place in relation to health and safety. This can be achieved using a number of methods. The best methods of monitoring are the ones which are conducted routinely and prior to an accident or negative event occurring. These active monitoring methods include things like health surveillance, conducting pre-use checks on equipment and of course, audits and inspections. There are also reactive monitoring methods, which are conducted after an accident or negative event has occurred and include methods such as incident investigations. These are also essential, as you need to learn lessons from negative events however, active monitoring methods are much more effective as these identify issues and allow you to correct them before the negative event occurs.

Ultimately, businesses need a blend of monitoring methods to effectively monitor the health and safety arrangements that have been put in place and thus, meet the requirements. Safety audits and inspections are an essential part of this blend, as they not only actively monitor your operational activities and documentation, but also monitor the effectiveness of other monitoring methods, ensuring issues from all elements of your safety management system are identified and corrected. In addition, since audits and inspections are generally documented as a report, audits in themselves can be used as evidence that you are meeting the requirements of the regulations.

So, although health and safety audits are not specifically highlighted as a requirement in the regulations, they are a critical method of actively monitoring work activities ensuring your organisation is meeting all legal requirements and that the workplace is as safe as it can possibly be.

Audits For Health and Safety Accreditation

Auditing is a requirement of most health and safety accreditation schemes such as ISO 45001 and CHAS and you will have to provide evidence that you conduct audits regularly if you want to attain these accreditations.

Although accreditation are not a legal requirement, they are important for the operations of many businesses.  Being able to display your accreditation can be crucial in presenting a professional appearance in comparison with other companies offering similar services. Also, it could help you to win new clients.

Why Are Safety Audits Important?

As mentioned, audits are essential for measuring your compliance to legislation and the requirements of accrediting bodies. However, there are also plenty of other reasons to conduct regular safety audits and inspections in your workplace.

No matter how involved and effective you are as a manager or director, you will never be aware of every problem or issue within your business. There will always be issues that staff forget about, don’t seem worthy of reporting to you or have just become a fact of day to day life. Although some issues may only seem minor, these issues can still lead to accidents and need to be addressed. However, by conducting audits and inspections regularly, you will get a more in depth picture of the issues in your business and allow you to correct these issues. Doing this will prevent these accidents and incidents, meaning you will see less down time, sick pay, claims, lower insurance premiums and a range of other financial benefits.

The act of getting out there with the sole purpose of identify and correcting safety issues can be a great morale booster for staff. It shows that you care about their safety and wellbeing and will ultimately result in a stronger health and safety culture within your business, which intern will lead to lower accident rates.

In addition, audits aren’t just about identifying the negative practices within your business. Audits also enable you to identify opportunities to improve your safety performance or efficiency of your processes and also good practices which can be celebrated and applied to other parts of your business.

So get out there and do some safety audits or better yet get the team at iSAFE to do some audits for you!

How can iSAFE help with your safety audits and inspections?

Hopefully you now realise how great audits are for your organisations safety management and as such, audits are a big part of many of  iSAFE‘s services. These are just some of the ways we can help, so if you cant find what your looking for, don’t hesitate to contact a member of our excellent team.

  • Conduct safety audits for you – it can be good to have another pair of eyes look at your business even if you conduct audits regularly yourself.
  • Develop audit checklists for you as part of your management system
  • Provide health and safety training to you and or your team on how to conduct an effective audit

In addition to this, we can coach the relevant person (at your company) on how to carry out the audit in the most effective way.