A critical part of maintaining and enhancing health and safety is the process of monitoring and assessing policy and implementation.

The results of various measurements, when properly evaluated, can be used to appraise the effectiveness of the control system in general and the health and safety policy in particular.

Proactive Monitoring

These techniques include safety inspections and audits, where the objective is to obtain performance feedback, enabling corrective action to be taken prior to any failure in the system. This type of monitoring is used to evaluate the level of compliance with a legal requirement, or with a stated organisational objective.

This may involve the setting up of a health and safety committee and risk assessments by a competent person. This must evaluate existing procedures of work and the actual methods and systems that are adopted.

The assessor must:

• identify hazards
• disregard inconsequential risks
• determine the likelihood of injury or harm
• quantify severity and the numbers of people who would be affected
• identify any specific legal duty or requirement relating to the hazard

The person charged with assessing health and safety must also:

• inspect the workplace and work environment
• check documentation to ensure compliance with statutory duties
• test and examine plant and machinery
• safety auditing

Reactive Monitoring

These systems are almost always limited to measurement of the extent of failure of safety management procedures. For example:

• historical records to show the extent of lost profits arising from damaged goods, lost production time and reduced output following a safety failure
• a review of accident and injury statistics either against national averages for the same sector of employment
• a review of absence statistics
• health monitoring
• review of complaints by employees
• risk control monitoring