Tips for Occupational Health and Safety Audits

Occupational Health and Safety was first introduced into Australia in 1956 when a magistrate ruled that employers had a responsibility to provide a safe place to work. Employers have a duty of care to their staff, as well as employees being responsible and following the safety systems set in place. An effective Occupational Health and Safety system means a reduction in deaths and workplace injuries. For any system to be effective it needs to be put in writing, and as well as having an Occupational Health and Safety Manual, the next step is to conduct an audit.

An Occupational Health and Safety Audit is a range of assessments that are undertaken to determine the effectiveness of management systems within a business, and it identifies the strengths and weaknesses of a safety system. An audit will then highlight and prioritise the areas where there are opportunities for improvements. An Occupational Health and Safety Audit should be a matter of course within every business, and these can be carried out by a professional who will come in and assess your workplace, or a basic assessment can be carried out internally. Audit standards vary and employers can gain a self insurance licence so they can complete a safety audit themselves.

Basic Audit

If you conduct a basic safety audit within your own workplace you need to look at how each job is performed within your business, and think about the Occupational Health and Safety issues within each job. Things to consider include vehicle traffic, checking pedestrian traffic areas and whether there is appropriate signage. Are areas with hazardous equipment displaying the correct safety signage and do visitors know where to report when they arrive? You also need to consider what your emergency procedures are and where a staff meeting point will be. Other things to consider include whether personal protective equipment is worn by employees, how products and equipment should be stored and handled, whether or not procedures are put into place for processes and equipment usage, if work areas are kept tidy and whether staff receive appropriate training to conduct their job in a safe manner. Workplace inspections should also include fire prevention, lighting, building safety, rubbish removal, machine safety, electrical safety, safe use and disposal of chemicals, ladders, first aid, office hazards and the condition of work vehicles.

Inspections by a Safety Consultant

An audit can be carried out by a Safety Consultant. They will conduct a comprehensive inspection of your workplace and on completion a written report will be issued with notes of what needs to be done to improve safety standards.

Compliance Auditing

Compliance Auditing is a specific audit undertaken to determine if workplace practices are meeting legislative requirements. The hazards looked at are determined by the workplace environment as well as information taken from any relevant injury data and industry input. Results will indicate if compliance is being achieved or if further improvement is required to meet legislative standards.

Hazard Specific Audits

This type of audit has a more narrow focus as it looks at the effectiveness of policies in dealing with specific hazards. These can include such issues as testing workplace methods or working heights. This sort of assessment needs to be conducted every 12 months.

Management System Audit

A much broader Occupational Health and Safety audit, it looks at organisational structures, planning activities, procedures and evaluations issues and review cycles and measurement.

By the way, do you want to learn more about Workplace Safety? If so, I suggest you check Self Insurance and Safety Management Consulting.

Companies Which Self Insure Employee Health Care Can Be Audited at Anytime

There are a lot of extra stipulations and regulations in the ObamaCare Health Care Law, which many people don't know about. We should not be surprised, you see, anytime any government tries to put together something so comprehensive, it must tie up the loose ends within the bill. That is why this new law is over 2200 pages. Many large and giant corporations will choose to self insurer for their employee health care benefits, rather than withhold money to pay an insurance company - this law allows for that. Not many people are aware of this.

For instance; a company like General Electric which is already involved in financial services, well, it makes sense that they would self insurer. And there are many companies which are privately held, which are also of significant size, and have subsidiaries in the healthcare insurance business, or have CFOs and CEOs, or board of directors, which have been involved with HMOs, hospitals, or large health insurance companies. Therefore, they too will wish to self insure.

It could very well become a decent profit center, as Health Care Insurance companies are allowed to make a profit of course, like a utility is for instance. Well, that profit is a given, and a large company has a captured audience, all those employees, who have no choice but to buy, as the Government has now mandated it, see that point.

Now then, the healthcare law states that any company who would self insurers can be subjected to an audit at any time, this is to protect the employees from an employer filing for bankruptcy and leaving them all out in the cold, and forcing the taxpayer to pay for this huge mistake, and the benefits they were promised while they were working. Remember we still live, at least for the time being, in a free-market economy and businesses do fail from time to time. (unless they are too big we are told).

One issue which was not addressed is that non-public companies that self-insure for healthcare insurance, or private companies, which are not public companies, and do not have to file the same information with the Securities Exchange Commission as public companies do will still be audit without warning. And there are a lot of benefits to not having to file all those forms, or make all that information public to your competitors, that advantage is now gone. Sarbanes Oxley didn't get them, but now this new law changes these things if they self-insure.

Unfortunately now the government can audit these private companies at any time, and once they do it becomes public information. This is pretty unfair for a private company, which has chosen to go a different route. Additionally there are a few very important questions which remain unanswered;

Who pays for these audits?
What are the rules?
Who trains the CFOs and Accounting Professionals on the rules?
What new licenses is required, on-going education, and which colleges can train these accounting employees?Is this just more Sarbanes Oxley draconian measures. Can you say more bureaucracy? And how does this help businesses? You see, when the government decides it's going to run everyone's company for them, the bureaucracy stifles the free market system, and this can only lead to lost productivity in the marketplace, and companies which cannot remain internationally competitive. This can only lead to fewer jobs, more jobs offshore, and more companies moving to China. Indeed I hope you will please consider all this.

Lance Winslow is a retired Founder of a Nationwide Franchise Chain, and now runs the Online Think Tank. Lance Winslow believes that as businesses expand they will need to build new facilities; http://www.tricitiescontractors.com.

Note: All of Lance Winslow's articles are written by him, not by Automated Software, any Computer Program, or Artificially Intelligent Software. None of his articles are outsourced, PLR Content or written by ghost writers.