Prime Practice Health and Safety Audit and Review

Welcome to PRIME PRACTICE – Health and safety audit review tool

Prime Practice Health and Safety Audit Review – EHS H&S

Following in the footsteps of our Business Improvement Review, PRIME PRACTICE is a diagnostic tool helping you ensure the health and safety of your people. Looking at culture and processes we can quickly identify the strengths and weaknesses, along with simple and practical action plans. This simple yet effective process will both review and audit your strategic health and safety processes using our unique 360 review method.  This approach has been proven to explore strengths and weaknesses in an organisations approach to health and safety in a sustainable and practical way.

The PRIME PRACTICE review and audit tool has been developed and refined by a team of experienced and practical business advisers. It is a practical approach to health and safety, not looking specifically at the law and the acts – but more importantly on the philosophy of health and safety from a practical point of view… leading to compliance.

The PRIME PRACTICE audit and review tool is unique in that it is not tied to individual pieces of legislation , but highly tied in to the principles behind such legislation – the management of loss – sometimes knows as loss control leadership. This ensures that the benchmarking ability in the tool will work even after recent legislation changes.  It has been shown the world over that the best organisations are rarely impacted by individual pieces of health and safety legislation in a given region, as there fundamental approach is so robust they have already dealt with potential hazards.

Much of the health and safety legislation is derived from the work of  Bird & Germain in the late 1960’s, certainly much of what we know know as risk assessment was born from Bird and Germain’s work in the petrochemical industry and the publication “Practical Loss Control Leadership”.
PRIME PRACTICE is a acronym for:

People
Resources
Information
Machinery
Environment

Policy
Responsibility
Arrangements
Control
Training
Information
Communication
Evidence

Health and Safety is an important part of any business. Get it right and you don’t notice it…. get it wrong and people will get injured and costs will spiral.
Worse – you can still get it wrong and you will not see things going wrong!

In may environments health and safety is seen as a burden. To some extent this is true. But it is about change – change is always difficult at first. Just look at the construction industry – the resistance they had to wearing hard hats and boots was huge… now it is the norm. In food services, the wearing of protective cloths, hats and masks was resisted at first – now it is the norm. .

This is true for many sectors. And as new risks are identified so we will have resistance again until we have learnt that it is OK.

One thing that few can argue is that using appropriate safety systems and PPE can and does reduce accidents. For those enlightened businesses reporting (internally) of near misses also contributes to changes in policy and process and does reduce the risk of incidents.

We are not advocating a cotton ball world – of course there will always be risks – our role is to identify risks which are likely to occur and take steps to reduce them so far as reasonably practicable.

The PRIME PRACTICE model is not based on the law from any one country. That is changing emphasis all the time. What PRIME PRACTICE does is to look at the generic principles of risk assessment, monitoring and the key areas of health and safety. We have taken our ideas from the worlds leading organisations on health and safety thinking.

Risk Assessment

The model below is a simple tool for looking at a given situation and identifying the level of action required.

Accident Ratios

Over the years there have been several studies on safety approaches, they all come to a similar conclusion:

For every 1 serious or major injury:
10 minor injuries
30 property damage accidents
600 near misses

So simple maths…. reduce the near misses…..

Accessing the Diagnostic Audit Tool

The diagnostic tool looking at health and safety is currently in beta testing (that is we are checking it with clients) before releasing it as a product.

The PRIME PRACTICE model is unique in that it maps to the Health and Safety legislation of the UK, EU, AU, NZ, US and many others. It is built on the principles established by Bird and Germain in their seminal work Practical Loss Control Leadership – and mapped to current best practice.

What is the PRIME PRACTICE audit and review tool?

The PRIME PRACTICE model was developed by Stewart and Morrison in 2007 to help businesses solve health and safety risks.  PRIME PRACTICE is a 360 degree health and safety audit of your company.

Web based, this tool will help identify the strengths and weaknesses of safety matters in your company. The PRIME PRACTICE tool requires little training to deploy and provides users with a practical action plan, or an agenda to use with internal or external resources

This Health and Safety Audit Tool is suitable for use in the following sectors and environments: Healthcare, Construction, Education, Financial, Voluntary, Legal, Manufacturing, Transport, Leisure, Government (local, national) sectors etc
It is due to be release in September 2008.
If you would like to be one of the early adopters of this powerful tool, please fill out your details in the contact form.

Keywords

audit, compliance, review, monitoring, culture, survey, management, management of loss, guidance, health and safety practices, diagnostic, action plan, health and safety planning, loss prevention, corporate manslaughter, responsibilities, accountabilities, loss control leadership, management of loss, risk assessment, checklist, audit