Planning Your Self-Inspection Program

A good safety audit program does not come easily. The effort requires careful planning and diligent preparation. The program unfolds after you decide what you want to cover in your inspections.
The following questions should be considered in laying plans for a safety audit program in your organization:

• What departments or operations will be covered in the inspection tour?
• What items or activities will be checked?
• How often will the inspections be carried out?
• Who will conduct the tours?
• How will the inspections be conducted?
• What type of followup activity will be put in place so that corrections are, in fact, made?
• Does management understand that hazards or unsafe work practices will need to be corrected and that this will require human resources, management and engineering expertise?

General vs. Specific

Of course, the very first question that must be asked, experts in the safety audit field generally agree, is: Do you want to conduct a general inspection or do you want to conduct a special type of inspection?

• General inspections are considered comprehensive reviews of all safety and industrial health exposures in a given area or even a complete facility.
• Special inspections (sometimes called targeted inspections) deal with specific exposures in a given unit, section, or even plantwide. Such an inspection might focus on electrical hazards in machinery used for manufacturing, or the hazards that may have generated back injuries as recorded in the OSHA 300 log or noticed during a review of workers' compensation reports. It could involve the branch's compliance with the OSHA hazard communication standard and the development of a checklist for compliance with the principal elements of that standard.

A good self-inspection program can include both the special and the general type of inspections. For example, one month a program could involve a complete plant tour for safety hazards. The next month the inspection program could focus on PPE and how it is used on the job.
OSHA encourages such a mixed approach, believing that a combination of the two types of programs can strengthen a plant's accident-prevention effort.

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Don't Face Costly Penalties

Whether your organization is big or small, OSHA demands a lot of you—and, if you fall short, you can face costly penalties (or, even more tragically, serious injuries or deaths).
Self-inspections are a big help. But there’s a lot to keep track of, and too many companies make the same preventable mistakes over and over, which is why the list of top citations varies little from year to year.