701 Effective Safety Committee Operations

Two Important Tools to Identify Hazards

The Safety Inspection

The first important tool is rather obvious: a safety inspection or audit. Three important points should be remembered when conducting a safety inspection.

• Know what you are doing: Only trained individuals should conduct safety inspections. They should be aware of the different types of hazards in the workplace. Unsafe materials, tools, equipment, workstation design, noise, atmospheres, temperature extremes, and work practices should be evaluated. The inspector should know what to look for and how to look for it. Get trained.
• Allow enough time: The more time you allocate to complete the safety inspection, the more likely you are to uncover hazards that could injure someone. A short inspection conducted once a quarter by an untrained safety committee member or supervisor may not be worth the time spent conducting it.
• Use a checklist:
• Advantages: Checklists, when properly constructed, help you inspect for hazardous conditions and unsafe work procedures in a structured, systematic manner. Without a checklist, quality is more likely to suffer over time, and the inspection process will vary widely from person to person, depending on their expertise.
• Disadvantages: Checklists take time to construct, time you may not have. However, the long-term advantages far outweigh the short-term effort. Another disadvantage is that using a checklist might cause "tunnel vision," where an inspector overlooks a hazard because it was not addressed in the checklist. The solution for this common issue is to include a "catch-all" question that asks if there are any other hazards that need to be corrected.

Knowledge Check Choose the best answer for the question.