Managing health and safety:health survey-4

Step 4: Measure your performance

Just like finance, production or sales, you need to measure your health and safety performance to find out if you are being successful. You need to know:
■where you are;
■where you want to be;
■what is the difference and why.

Active monitoring, before things go wrong, involves regular inspection and checking to ensure that your standards are being implemented and management controls are working.
Reactive monitoring, after things go wrong, involves learning from your mistakes, whether they have resulted in injuries and illness, property damage or near misses.
Two key components of monitoring systems

■Active monitoring (before things go wrong). Are you achieving the objectives and standards you set yourself and are they effective?

■Reactive monitoring (after things go wrong). Investigating injuries, cases of illness, property damage and near misses identifying in each case why performance was substandard.

You need to ensure that information from active and reactive monitoring is used to identify situations that create risks, and do something about them.
Priority should be given where risks are greatest. Look closely at serious events and those with potential for serious harm.
Both require an understanding of the immediate and the underlying causes of events. Investigate and record what happened find out why.

Ask yourself

1.Do you know how well you perform in health and safety?
2 How do you know if you are meeting your own objectives and standards for health and safety? Are your controls for risks good enough?
3 How do you know you are complying with the health and safety laws that affect your business?
4 Do your accident investigations get to all the underlying causes or do they stop when you find the first person who has made a mistake?
5 Do you have accurate records of injuries, ill health and accidental loss?

Step 5: Learn from experience audit and review

Monitoring provides the information to let you review activities and decide how to improve performance. Audits, by your own staff or outsiders, complement monitoring activities by looking to see if your policy, organisation and systems are actually achieving the right results.  They tell you about the reliability and effectiveness of your systems.

Learn from your experiences. Combine the results from measuring performance with information from audits to improve your approach to health and safety management.

Review the effectiveness of your health and safety policy, paying particular attention to:

■the degree of compliance with health and safety performance standards (including legislation);
■areas where standards are absent or inadequate;
■achievement of stated objectives within given timescales;
■injury, illness and incident data analyses of immediate and underlying causes, trends and common features.
These indicators will show you where you need to improve.

Ask yourself:

1 How do you learn from your mistakes and your successes?
2 Do you carry out health and safety audits?
3 What action is taken on audit findings?
4 Do the audits involve staff at all levels?
5 When did you last review your policy and performance?

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Managing health and safety:health survey-1

Five steps to success

This booklet summarises the key messages of Successful health and safety management  which retains the well received framework for managing health and safety set out in earlier editions, as well as providing improved guidance on:

1. planning for health and safety;
2. accident and incident investigation;
3. health and safety auditing.

This booklet also explains what is involved in good management of health and safety and the cost of getting it wrong.
It is aimed at directors and managers and should also help supervisors, owners of small firms, employee representatives, insurance companies, trade associations and other key players.
Many of the messages will be of interest to small and medium sized firms, who will find further information in Essentials of health and safetya twork and Five steps to riskassessment see page 11 for details.

Why manage health and safety?

Every working day in Great Britain at least one person is killed and over 6000 are injured at work.
Every year three quarters of a million people take time off work because of what they regard as workrelated illness. About 30 million work days are lost as a result.

Accidents and ill health are costly to workers and their families. They can also hurt companies because, in addition to the costs of personal injuries, they may incur far greater costs from damage to property or equipment, and lost production.

With very few exceptions, employers have to have liability insurance cover for injuries and ill health to their employees.

They will also have insurance for accidents involving vehicles and possibly third party and buildings insurance.
However, insurance policies only cover a small proportion of the costs of accidents. Costs not covered by insurance can include:

• sick-pay;
• damage or loss of product and raw materials;
• repairs to plant and equipment;  
• overtime working and temporary labour;
• production delays;
• investigation time;
• fines.

HSE studies have found that uninsured costs outweigh those covered by insurance policies.
In a wide range of business sizes and activities, the total uninsured losses from daytoday accidents ranged from twice up to 36 times the total paid in insurance premiums in the same year; the average was around ten times the amount paid in premiums.

So in some cases, you could think of accident costs like an iceberg, with the majority of the losses uninsured and hidden below the water line.

Directors and managers can be held personally responsible for failures to control health and safety. Can you afford such failures? Do you really manage health and safety?

This bookletshows you how. It lists five steps to success.
You will have fewer stoppages, higher output, and better quality. By complying with the law and avoiding fines you will avoid damaging publicity.

You cannot be a 'quality' organisation unless you apply sound management principles to health and safety.
Inspectors visiting your workplace will want to know how you manage health and safety.

If an accident occurs, you, your systems, procedures, and employees will come under scrutiny. Will they stand up to examination? Read about the five steps and ask yourself the five questions after each one. Get your managers and staff to discuss them.

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