• Monitoring your Health & Safety and taking an Active Approach

  Created: 08/08/2024
  News/Events Category: Governance
  
  
  

  

  As part of ensuring that your organisation is meeting its duties and commitments to healthy and safety it is important to monitor your health and safety performance throughout the year. Glasgow Council for the Voluntary Sector (GCVS) have shared a guide to help you do this. 

  Types of Monitoring

  There are two types of monitoring that you can undertake as part of this process.

  • Active Monitoring – this is concerned with ensuring that health and safety standards are being met and is interested in doing so before and incident, accident or other event takes place
  • Reactive Monitoring – this looks at the accident, incident or other event to find investigate and find areas of concern and underlying causes

  Active Monitoring

  Active Monitoring is intended to check things before something happens which is unwanted (such as an accident, incident etc.) within the workplace or related to your workplace activities.

  Active Monitoring can help:

  • Ensure legal standards are met and the processes that enable compliance are maintained
  • Where legal standards are not met, you can identify why and put in place remedial actions to ensure compliance is met

  The following links provide some further information about monitoring health and safety at work: 

  HSE - Leading health and safety at work: Monitor health and safety at work

  IGC1_Element_5_Part_1.pdf (SECURED) (iso9001help.co.uk)

  When researching this for your own organisation you may come across the term ‘Leading Standards’ when looking at Active Monitoring. Leading Standards are indicators which show the direction of travel before an event (such as an accident) takes place. If the direction of travel is in a positive direction this would indicate that an accident is less likely to occur and vice versa if it was moving in a negative direction.

  How do you know the direction of travel?

  If you have a healthy number of inspections and few issues are being found and compliance is found to be met, this would be a Leading Indicator of a Positive Direction of Travel.

  If, however, fewer inspections are taking place, issues are being raised in these or the inspections are not being done properly (e.g., tick boxing rather than doing the inspection correctly), this would be a Leading Indicator of a Negative Direction of Travel.

  We now know what Leading Indicators show, but what do we measure these against?

  As an organisation you need to set ‘Performance Standards’ – what you are monitoring and to what standard.

  These standards can look at physical controls such as manual handling standards are meet, these can be actively monitored to ensure staff are following the requirements, this can be done by carrying out a routine inspection of manual handling within the workplace.

  You can also Actively Monitor your Management of Health & Safety to help ensure your compliance with the management of Health & Safety within your organisation. For example you could look at:

  • Risk Assessments – are they suitable and sufficient work the activities you do?
  • Provision of Training – do you have a suitable training schedule in place?
  • Completion of workplace inspections – are these recorded, reviewed and acted upon?
  • Review of Safety meetings – are your meetings reviewed and acted upon?

  Example of how to actively monitor

  One way to implement a form of Active Monitoring is to put in place a Health & Safety Inspection, for most third sector organisation this would be a Routine General Inspection of the workplace. This would look to see that standards are being met or if not put in place corrective actions.

  General Inspection can be thought of as looking at the 4 ‘Ps’

  1. Plant – machinery, equipment and vehicles
  2. Premises – the workplace and workplace environment
  3. People – behaviour and working to standards
  4. Procedures – your safe systems of work, method statements, risk assessments etc.

  As an organisation you need to this what monitoring methods suit your workplace and the activities you undertake. How often should these be undertaken – weekly, monthly etc. this will be influenced by the activism undertaken, staff availability etc.

  You need to identify who will be responsible, remember to update your Organisation Section of your Health & Safety Policy to show these responsibilities. Have a plan in place for any issues raised in the monitoring.

  Other types of active monitoring

  Safety Sampling – Taking a representative sample of a particular workplace standard, this tends to be used in workplaces which have a large pool of a certain standard to sample from and as such tends to be more effective in larger organisations. e.g., if an organisation had 1000 fire extinguishers taking a representative sample to check (such as 60) would give a good indication that standards were being met for all extinguishers. This would provide active monitoring for these pending a full inspection by a competent engineer.

  Safety Tours – this is often called a workplace walk around and would include, senior management. This can be formal or informal. The group undertaking the walkaround should include, management, staff, a Health & Safety specialist and occupational health. Tours are very visible within the workplace and can help raise Health & Safety awareness as well as showing management commitment to Health & Safety. Tours are more general than an inspection and would include interaction with staff undertaking activities.

  
  
  

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