What is Health and Safety Audit

A health and safety audit is an expert assessment of an organisation's health and safety policies, systems and procedures. Primarily, audits enable you to protect employees and customers from harm. But ultimately a correctly conducted audit can also safeguard the very existence of the company.

The key to health and safety in workplace is promoting safe work condition and compliance with the regulations. However, flaunting the norms or unaware of the potential hazard yield in workplace accidents. Outcome post-accident investigation reflects that the organization has not carried out occupational health and safety audit, which is considered as tool of controlling hazard. The objective of the audit is to assess compliance with established guidelines.

This audit is not just confined to hazard identification, rather a comprehensive examination of H & S management. Avail best of the H & S audit from MLC professionals for ensuring a safe workplace. We render H & S auditing services to needy corporates in the following areas:

Key Elements That Make a Successful Health and Safety Audit

A successful health and safety audit is about more than just ticking a box or meeting a legal requirement. It is about creating a safe culture within your workplace by identifying hazards and risks, and developing a plan to eliminate or mitigate them.

The following are important factors that must be present in every health and safety audit:

Commitment

A successful health and safety audit requires commitment from people at all levels of the organization. For it to be effective, management and staff need to be fully committed to making the changes required to improve the company’s health and safety performance.

This means that you need to ask yourself why you are doing the audit and how much money and time you have to dedicate to it. Leadership commitment is crucial for a successful health and safety audit. You need to be committed to the process of auditing and follow through with the plan that you have put together to make sure your company is safe. There is a reason why health and safety audits are considered best practice for any company - they work and they work well.

The Right Tools

A health and safety audit is basically a review of the business operations and practices to determine how well it complies with relevant legislation. The right tools will help you to carry out your audit professionally and efficiently.

There are different types of tools you can use depending on the audit you are conducting. Some types of information gathering tools are manual and involve supervisory people such as front-line employees, whereas other types of information gathering tools are automated. A lot of people think that you need to be a qualified safety professional to conduct a successful health and safety audit. However, this is not the case. In fact, you can conduct a very successful health and safety audit with the right tools.

Depending on your issue, you will need different tools, such as a checklist, software to deal with the issues, audit rules to carry out the audit, reference lists to follow up on if you need guidance, reporting templates, email notifications or anything else you need to know in order to carry out your audit successfully.

Effective Collaboration

When it comes to your health and safety audit, you cannot do it alone. You need to get all the players on your team involved, in order to make sure that you are following all the right procedures and doing everything correctly. You need to make sure that your workforce knows how to access the required information to conduct an audit. Sometimes the best way to improve your chances of success is to have a third party look at it from an outsider’s point of view. A health and safety audit, conducted by a professional, can help you identify where your business has blind spots and areas for improvement.

Data Collection

A health and safety audit will help you identify where you need to improve your health and safety procedures. Without data, you won’t know where to focus your efforts, and you won’t be able to measure the changes you’ve made. You can only make informed decisions by collecting data. So, you will need to collect a lot of information about the working conditions of your employees. You will need to note any potential hazards and also areas where you can improve. This is necessary in order to perform a detailed analysis of the most important health and safety issues in your company.

Risk Management

A successful health and safety audit is all about risk management. You need to identify the risks associated with your workplace and then decide which risks can be eliminated or reduced and which ones you need to be prepared to accept. For an audit to be effective therefore, corporations should put in place a plan to identify and assess risk, followed by a detailed schedule of corrective actions, using a risk management framework.

Audit Reports

A successful health and safety audit is all about detail. If you are going to do a health and safety audit, you need to be very thorough. You cannot just do a quick walkthrough of your facility and expect everything to be perfect.

The audit is meant to provide information for use in decision making. In order to make any changes to your health and safety management system, you are going to need to know what areas need changing. This is where a detailed audit report comes in handy, as it does not just tell you what’s wrong; it also provides recommendations for how to fix the problem.

A detailed audit report is necessary to determine whether there are any health and safety violations in the workplace. Inspectors will check if your business has a safe system of work in place. A detailed audit report is needed as proof for a successful health and safety audit. and aslo add image at the middle of the matter and design should look attractive.