The safety geek in me got a little over excited this week because one of my clients showed me IAuditor www.app.safetyculture.io. A quick review of the site showed that you could download a banquet of interactive audit forms without even buying the app! At face value this seems like a bargain; however, this week I decided to investigate the pros and cons of health and safety auditing apps and pre-made forms.
DEFINITIONS:
Firstly, we need to define the difference between an audit and a worksite inspection.
Workplace Inspection = Routine monitoring of basic provisions for Health and Safety
Workplace Audit = An internal safety audit is a comprehensive and systematic evaluation of the organisation and their Safety Management System (or part of it).
Using these definitions, the apps are really providing tools for workplace inspection tools.
HEALTH ADN SAFETY AUDITING APP STRENGTHS:
- They focus on standard hazard categories that link to Risk basements/ HAZIDs
- They make use of experience from previous risk assessments and incident learnings if you can customise them
- They can be prepared and carried out by a single person at low cost
HEALTH ADN SAFETY AUDITING APP WEAKNESS:
- These forms are limited to previous experience, and may not anticipate new risks
- They do not encourage intuitive thinking and give less insight into the nature of the hazards/risks on a specific site
- The ‘auditor’ can get so caught up in the form, they forget to look at the site as a whole or talk to the humans working there
SO WHAT?
I prefer to call workplace inspections “Vital Sign Checks”. I encourage people to put the forms and weapons of mass distraction (mobile phones, tablets, clipboards) down and focus on their ‘clients’….the people working on site.
Overall, a generic audit checklist is useful post audit to record what was seen; however, nothing works so well as a walk and talk about TPIE:
Time: Are we on schedule, do we have enough time?
People: Are there enough people and are they trained to do the job?
Information: Do we have the right information to meet the project’s objectives?
Equipment: Do we have the right equipment and is it functioning?
I’d be interested to know what resources other people are using for their health and safety auditing programmes, send me an email or give me a call on 0272 007 680 if you have any ideas or comments.
Have a safe and productive week.
SB