What is a Health and Safety Inspection?
A health and safety inspection is a series of steps taken to assess hazards and risks in your workplace, with a view to making necessary changes to prevent future injury or damage. In short, it’s a process that helps keep your employees, equipment and workplace safe. An effective health and safety inspection will enable you to proactively monitor your day-to-day safety processes and ensure compliance with your industry’s safety standards.
Health and safety inspections typically fall into a couple of categories. A safety inspection can be systemic, where systems and processes are assessed more widely to consider the most common safety issues that occur. This might take in a general tour of the workplace, or a survey of specific high-risk activities across the organisation. A safety inspection can also be extrinsic, where the assessment focuses on one specific incident or process in a workplace. Whichever category it falls into, all health and safety inspections have the shared aim of making processes safer.
What is the difference between a Safety Inspection and a Safety Audit?
You might hear safety inspections and safety audits spoken about in the same breath, but they are two separate processes with slightly different aims. A safety inspection primarily looks at hazards. It highlights material changes or improvements that can be made to equipment, machinery, storage, workplace locations or established processes.
On the other hand, a safety audit is a more comprehensive assessment that looks at how well existing policies are being followed and how effective they are as a result. An audit will look at things like incident reports, policy documents and employee training records in order to highlight any weaknesses in communication or record-keeping. The time taken is also different. While a safety audit might take several weeks depending on its scope, carrying out a safety inspection for a specific piece of equipment or workspace might take a couple of hours or even just a few minutes.
Benefits of Health and Safety Inspections in the workplace
The most obvious benefit of health and safety inspections is being able to identify and then mitigate hazards before they become a material danger to your employees. Regularly assessing your workplace safety will ensure your teams are protected and are able to carry out their roles safely and confidently.
When your employees see that health and safety inspections are a routine part of life in your organisation, it signals to them that safety and safe working practices are a priority. Regular safety inspections are also a good opportunity to hear directly from your employees about their well-being at work. Following up on improvements that your teams suggest as part of a wider safety inspection shows them that their ideas are valued. This can lead to greater employee engagement in health and safety which in turn makes for a stronger safety culture across your organisation.
As well as identifying hazards and areas for improvement, another benefit of a health and safety inspection is the opportunity it creates to highlight good safety practice at work. While continuous improvement is important, being able to spotlight and reward positive behaviour is also highly motivating and helps improve your company’s reputation for upholding high safety standards.
How often should Health and Safety Inspections be carried out?
Workplace safety inspections should be carried out regularly, but ‘regularly’ will look different depending on your workplace. A typically low-risk work environment, such as an administrative office, won’t need the same level of attention as a high-risk workplace like a construction site.
How often you should carry out safety inspections will also depend on changes to the work environment, such as buying and using new equipment, new or updated policies, or new employees joining the team.
To help support compliance, a schedule of planned inspections is always recommended. By doing so, you can clearly demonstrate to regulators that work area’s are being continually monitored to ensure a safe working environment for your employees. You can also show that vehicles or machinery, for example, are being checked for any damage/faults prior to use.
Ultimately the frequency of health and safety inspections is down to you. If you are carrying out an inspection daily and you keep finding corrective actions, continue to carry out the inspection daily. If, over time, you are finding that particular inspection is coming back without any corrective actions, push your inspections out to weekly or bi-weekly.
Who is responsible for Health and Safety Inspections?
Inspections – whether that be site walkthroughs, or survey’s, should be carried out by the person or people with the expertise relevant to the area that they are inspecting. This could be managers or supervisors, but it might also include the employees who use a certain piece of equipment or work in a specific area.
You may also want to outsource to a third-party inspection team if you feel like you don’t yet have the internal know-how. What is essential is that those completing the inspection have the right experience and knowledge to be able to spot hazards, advise on how to mitigate them and make suggestions for what improvements could be made.
How is a Health and Safety Inspection carried out?
As we’ve discussed, the length and scope of your health and safety inspection can vary depending on your industry or the area you are looking into. That said, most health and safety inspections should include the following steps: planning, making a checklist, the walk-through and recording your findings.
Planning for a Health and Safety Inspection
Before carrying out your inspection, there are some things you need to consider. Firstly, decide who will be carrying out the inspection. Who has the expertise within the area that the inspection covers? Do you need external support? Make sure whoever is carrying out the inspection also has a good understanding of industry regulations and compliance. This can improve the focus of your inspection and ensure that any changes you make are the right ones.
Planning where the inspection will take place is also crucial. Even if your inspection is company-wide, make sure you consider every location individually before carrying out your walk-through. This can help pre-empt potential hazards or highlight important areas that your inspection team shouldn’t miss. Reviewing past inspection reports, risk assessments or hazard reports is also helpful here.
At this stage, you should agree on how your findings will be recorded at the end of the inspection. Will they be formally recorded on your safety management system? Who will see these and will they be shared with the wider team? Make sure you decide to record your findings in a way that will benefit your workplace and ensure that any changes are made in a timely manner.
Creating a checklist
Once you’ve established the areas that the inspection will cover, the next step is to create a checklist of actions to include. Again, this will vary from workplace to workplace, but here are some common things that could be included.
Machinery and equipment
Is your machinery and equipment well-maintained? What measures are in place to protect the employees who use it? Is anything out of date or due for an upgrade?
Chemicals and hazardous substances
How are these stored? Do employees have access to appropriate PPE?
Manual handling
Is staff manual handling training up to date? Is it appropriate for the work they do? Do they need any additional equipment or aids?
Fire safety
Where are your fire extinguishers and do staff know how to operate them? Are escape routes well-signposted and are they kept clear?
General staff welfare
How clean are the areas your team works in? Do they have adequate space for breaks? Do they have access to a well-stocked first aid kit?
Of course, these examples are not exhaustive but do highlight some key questions that you will need to consider during your safety inspection. Your checklist is also an evolving document. The next time you carry out a safety inspection, create a new checklist and make sure you are considering any changes that might have been made since the last inspection.
The walk-through
Now that you have your checklist, you can start the physical walk-through of your workplace. Using your checklist as your starting point, look for any unsafe conditions or practices that are happening in each area. This will include any slip and trip hazards like trailing wires or wet floors. Look for any faulty or damaged equipment, including inappropriate PPE or out-of-date testing certificates.
When carrying out the walk-through, make sure you stick to your planned inspection. Checking areas at random or wandering around without a focus can mean that you miss less obvious hazards and therefore can’t take the appropriate steps to mitigate them.
Recording your findings
It is important to record your observations following a health and safety inspection, however small they may be, and communicate your findings with the appropriate team members. Not only does this help to inform what changes need to be made, but formally recording your safety inspections also helps to demonstrate your efforts to comply with industry regulations and legal requirements.
What steps are involved after a Health and Safety Inspection?
Once you complete a health and safety inspection, the next step is to create an action plan. Your action plan will include the changes needed to improve the safety of particular areas in your workplace. It will also outline who is responsible for these changes and when they must be implemented. Make sure that the person responsible has all the information they need, particularly if they were not involved directly in the safety inspection.
You should also take steps to monitor the progress of these changes. You could even arrange for a follow-up inspection to take place later down the line to ensure that the safety improvements have been effective.
How can technology benefit you when carrying out Safety Inspections?
Carrying out an effective health and safety inspection can seem like a daunting or time-consuming task. Thankfully, Notify Technology has the digital tools available to help streamline the process and make your safety inspections more straightforward.
With Notify’s safety audit and inspection software, you can create digital templates for safety inspections that can be cloned and customised to suit your business needs. You can apply custom visibility rules to your inspection templates so that your team members only see the questions that they need to answer, saving everyone time and increasing response rates.
Thanks to our native safety audit app, inspections can be carried out anywhere, at any time and on any device, on or offline. By digitally standardising answer fields, you will capture more accurate and more consistent data too, helping you with trend analysis.
Findings can be viewed in our Safety Intelligence dashboards in real-time and that data can be shared digitally across your teams, ensuring that those who need to see the information can do so with ease, wherever they work from.
Notify can support your follow-up activity too. Thanks to our software, you can assign corrective actions to certain team members and track their progress, all without the need for paper files or lengthy email chains. You can also schedule and keep track of future inspections, ensuring that health and safety monitoring is ongoing and is prioritised throughout the year.
If you’d like to find out more about how Notify can help simplify safety inspections and level up your company’s health and safety culture, get in touch today.