How Health and Safety Management Systems Work and What They Look Like
A health and safety management system is the organised way a workplace plans its safety, puts the plan into action, checks the results and improves. This element covers the Plan, Do, Check, Act model, the two best-known published systems, the value of formal and informal approaches, and the health and safety policy that anchors it all.
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2.1 Key Components of a Health and Safety Management System
The structure of a system: the Plan, Do, Check, Act model
Managing occupational health and safety (OHS) takes a steady, organised effort. That effort does not always have to be a formal management system, but whatever approach is used will almost certainly follow four steps: Plan, Do, Check, Act.
The four-step model balances the system side of management with the behaviour side. It also treats health and safety as part of good management in general rather than as a separate system standing apart. In brief:
- Plan. Set the objectives and the processes needed to deliver results in line with the organisation's OHS policy.
- Do. Put those processes into practice.
- Check. Monitor and measure the processes against the OHS policy, the objectives and the legal and other requirements, then report the results.
- Act. Take action to improve OHS performance continually.
Many health and safety management systems have been published, and every one of them reflects the plan, do, check, act cycle. Two that are widely used are ISO 45001:2018 and ILO-OSH 2001.
The ILO-OSH 2001 management system
The ILO guidelines break a management system into the following parts.
Policy. Effective safety and health management needs a full policy that satisfies national and international standards and also supports the business as a whole. The policy must be specific to the organisation, so that everyone can see how the company approaches safety and health and how it will respond to problems. It matters because it acts as a strategic plan for the whole company.
A good policy is written, brief, easy for every stakeholder to understand, dated and approved by the managing director or management board, and brought to the attention of workers, supervisors and managers.
Organising. The best policy on paper is useless until it is put into practice, and that takes organisation. Responsibilities and relationships must be set up so that a positive safety and health culture runs from top to bottom. The employer carries overall responsibility for protecting workers' safety and health. After full consultation and agreement with stakeholders, responsibilities, accountabilities and authorities must be defined for developing, implementing and delivering the policy. This means making safety and health a line-management responsibility that everyone knows and accepts, and setting up effective arrangements to identify, measure where possible, and control work-related hazards and risks while promoting health at work. The people given these duties must also receive the time, money and training they need to do the job properly.
Planning and implementation. Once the policy and the organisational arrangements exist, the policy must be carried out, and that calls for careful planning and coordination. After an initial gap analysis, the organisation should draw up plans, develop programmes and procedures, and set priorities based on relative risk. It should also set goals and performance standards for management action and agree a realistic timetable. This reduces risk and provides a baseline against which later standards can be measured.
Evaluation. Performance must be monitored regularly. Early progress and enthusiasm often fade and standards slip. Management must therefore set up procedures to monitor, measure and record safety and health performance. These can include regular inspections by the safety and health committee, external audits and advice, and analysis of sickness and accident records. Companies with strong records compare their performance with agreed plans and standards on a regular basis and keep fine-tuning to improve.
Auditing. Evaluate evidence systematically and independently against defined criteria within an agreed scope. An audit may examine the whole management system or selected processes. Sampling provides evidence about effectiveness and gaps; it cannot confirm that every activity is always safe.
Action for improvement. This is an overall judgement: does the system work, and how can it be better? It compares the design and resourcing of the system with the performance actually achieved. It shows a commitment to managing health and safety risks proactively, so that accidents and ill health fall, or so that the same goals are met with fewer resources.
Preventive and corrective action. Preventive action removes the cause of a potential nonconformity or other undesirable situation. Corrective action removes the cause of a nonconformity or undesirable situation that has already been found. A single problem may have more than one cause. Put simply, preventive action stops something happening, and corrective action stops it happening again.
Continual improvement. The system should not stand still. It should develop over time so that it becomes more and more suitable and useful to the organisation it serves.
Summary notes for Element 2 · Cheat sheet · Glossary. A study aid, not published or endorsed by NEBOSH.