Safety and Health Management System - Coursework Example

Safety and Health Management System Safety and Health Management System Introduction Work place injuries, fatalities, and illness usually lead to losses in the company revenues and reduction of profits as well as immeasurable pain and sufferings to the affected employees and their immediate families. In most cases, company’s profit margin often reduce due to compensations of the affected employees as well as their treatments. Therefore, there are needs to initiate and implement Effective Safety and Health Management Systems (SHMS) towards improving health and safety measures of the employees. This will also improve the XYZ, Inc.’s company profit margin form its current 2.5 percent to the targeted 4.5 percent (Redinger and Levine, 1999). Additionally, improvement of the safety and health management systems within the organization will improve productivity of working by reducing fears that are usually impacted on them from severely injured workmates. Therefore, the main purpose of initiating and implementing SHMS to its totality is to reduce costs related to injuries at workplace. Notably, saving a crewed by effective implementation of SHMS will definitely exceed the SHMS workplace costs (American National Standard, 2005). SHMS’s Critical Elements The effective SHMS’s critical elements includes the commitment of the management and the employees’ involvement, prevention and control of hazards, supervisors, managers, and employees’ training, worksite analysis. “MANAGEMENT PLANNING AND COMMITMENT” The culture of the organization can have direct influence on safety and health management system successes within the organization. Therefore, this organization must play vital role in ensuring its success in relation to the SHMS (Czerniak and Ostrander, 2005). The management is the first organ of the organization that will be required to manage SHMS just like it would manage other organizational duties and concerns. In other words, the management must integrate safety and health management systems into all organs or departments of the organization (American National Standard, 2005). Moreover, all the departmental heads must be involved personally in establishing safety and health accountabilities within their departments. “ORGANIZATION’S SAFETY AND HEALTH POLICY STATEMENT” “The workplace must be safe and healthful to every employee. All employees must follow and adhere to safe and healthful work practices and outline in each work practice’s safety and healthy rules and regulations.” It is worth noting that working with each departmental head, SHM rules and regulations will be established for every work practice towards ensuring that all the workplaces are safe and healthy for all workers at all times. The departmental heads should ensure free low of communication with their employees to enable free participation and involvement of the employees in understanding their environmental risk work practices (Anton, 1989). With full responsibility and spirit of accountability, the employees will propose measures through which the identified environmental safety and health risks can be mitigated towards increasing workplace performances. “THE RESPONSIBILITY OF SAFETY COORDINATORS” Since each department deals with different aspect of organizational operations, each will be mandated to initiate, implement, coordinate, and administer their safety and health systems that will reduce risk to workers at each department. Vital activities that the safety coordinators will be expected to administer include: Facilitate or train safety and health issues to the workers Tabulate injuries statistical reports that compares severity and the rate of occurrence of such injuries Conduct intense supervision to employees particularly in areas noted to be prone to severe injuries “SAFETY AND HEALTHY ISSUES RESPONSES” It is vital that all the safety and health issues registered on at workplaces are audited towards prompting organizational action plan of reducing or eradicating such safety and health risk issues. At this point, each departmental head will submit safety and health report as per the workplace observation and in line with the collected statistical injury data (Redinger and Levine, 1999). Moreover, these reports must incorporate employees’ participations and opinions regarding workplace safety and health issues. The involvement of employees’ report and the management reports will enable organization to determine whether its employees have good and effective systems of reporting hazards. Regardless of the nature of the employees reporting systems, the immediate supervisors will be required to analyze the employees among other tabled reports towards determining appropriate actions of reducing the reported hazards. “MEETINGS OF SAFTEY AND HEALTH ISSUES” The organization will be meeting to discuss organizational safety and health issues. This meeting will mainly be held to communicate safety and health concerns and issues to employees. For quick understanding and reducing ill safety and health in the organization, such meeting shall be held monthly. “PROCEDURES, POLICIES, AND SAFETY AND HEALTH RULES” After providing recommendations from both the immediate supervisors and departmental heads, the top management will be required to implement the major recommended issues and turn them into organizational policies that will dictate the safety and health procedures. These policies and procedures will be adopted by employees and their immediate supervisor (Redinger and Levine, 1999). In this case, the organization shall have incorporated the OSHA specific safety and health procedures in adopting the organization’s safety and health procedures. All the formulated safety and health rules and procedures must be communicated to the employees either directly or through internal memos. “WORKSITE ANALYSIS” Worksite analysis will be conducted through systematic actions. This approach is prudent since it will help in providing the needed information towards identifying and understanding potential hazards and known hazards at the organization’s workplaces. Some of the actions for the worksite analysis include: i. Applying comprehensive hazard surveys as provided for by OSHA. ii. Analysis of new changes in policies, processes, and equipment towards reducing hazard. iii. Conducting proper supervision on both the employee and the management towards regulating site safety and health concerns. iv. Analyzing the hazards and potential hazards reported by the employees v. Analysis of worksite injuries vi. Analyzing the safety of the jobs All these analyses must be tabulated/noted and copies made to different safety and health departments particularly the fire department for further analysis and recommendations. “INVESTIGATION OF ACCIDENTS AND/OR INCIDENTS” This is done to determine the main cause of such accidents and/or incidents towards preventing future accidents and/or incidents of the same nature. “HAZARD PREVENTION AND CONTROL” After the identification of all possible causes of hazards that lead to safety and health issues within organization and across all departments, the management especially departmental heads must therefore develop appropriate systems towards preventing and controlling such hazards (Czerniak and Ostrander, 2005). Each hazard has its own different and unique control measure or measures; hence, each hazard shall be analyzed critically against their prompters and solution provided in line with OSHA requirements and regulation as per each department’s uniqueness (International Labour Office., & International Labour Conference, 2009). “SAFETY AND HEALTH TRAINING” The main goal of this project is to implement effective safety and health management systems (SHMS) towards reducing injuries at workplace thereby reducing XYZ, Inc.’s spending on such injuries (Anton, 1989). Therefore, all these strategies target XYZ, Inc.’s employees; thus, all these measures to reduce injuries among employees is to be effected on them, and this will only be done through training them (Redinger and Levine, 1999). The other group to be trained is the supervisors. Finally, it is worth noting that implementing all these measures will reduce the company spending on injuries at workplace thereby increasing it profit margin from its current “2.5 percent to 4.5 percent”. References American National Standard: Occupational Health and Safety Management Systems. (2005). Fairfax, Va: American Industrial Hygiene Association. Anton, T. J. (1989). Occupational safety and health management. New York: McGraw-Hill. Czerniak, J., & Ostrander, D. (2005). Nine elements of a successful safety & health system. Itasca, Ill: National Safety Council. International Labour Office., & International Labour Conference. (2009). ILO standards on occupational safety and health: Promoting a safe and healthy working environment. Geneva: ILO. Redinger, C. F., & Levine, S. P. (1999). Occupational health and safety management system performance measurement: A universal assessment instrument. Fairfax, VA: American Industrial Hygiene Assoc. Read More