Safety Committees are a valuable part of your safety program. Who participates and how often you meet will be up to your organization structure and needs. But establishing safety committees is an excellent way management can encourage employees to participate in implementing and monitoring the company’s safety program. When you develop your safety committee it is important to include employee representative for all departments…for example your technicians, office workers, maintainance, etc. Members should be rotated periodically to allow for maximum involvement and increased safety awareness.
Once an accident investigation is completed, it should be forwarded to the safety department to be reviewed at the next Safety Committee meeting.
The Safety Committee should have an open discussion on the past accidents to determine if all the events leading up to the accident were identified, if corrective action was implemented and if the corrective measures are appropriate to prevent future incidents. Witnesses, maintenance, supervisors, even the employees involved in the accident could be invited to the meeting to discuss the events and provide additional preventative recommendations. This is not a process to assign blame, but rather a group effort to learn from the past and use that knowledge to prevent future accidents. The Safety Committee should also be looking for trends or problem areas while reviewing the accident investigations.
The committee will have several roles, such as assist in the development, implementation, and periodic evaluation of the safety and health activities. Meetings should be held regularly and all committee members must attend. Minutes of the Safety Committee meeting should be recorded.
The committee should be responsible for the following tasks:
- Review existing safety and health rules and procedures to ensure that these rules are current, pertinent, and being followed.
- Provide suggestions for employee training.
- Review all accident reports to identify its root cause and determine appropriate corrective action by implementing one or more E.S.P. techniques:
* Engineering Controls
* Safe Work Practices
* Personal Protective Equipment - Audit the results of all safety inspections conducted.
- Review training programs with particular attention being given to training involved in the following areas:
* New or transferred employees.
* New safety and health regulations.
* New or modified procedures or processes.
* New equipment or chemicals. - Be involved in preliminary hazard analysis for new equipment, new processes, and new designs.
- Conduct periodic in-house safety inspections.
- Provide recommendations to management on safety and health issues.
- Evaluation of the safety and loss prevention program.
