Safety Committees Should Help Evaluate the SMS
The safety committee can help by evaluating the employer's accident and illness prevention program, and making written recommendations to improve the program where applicable. This best practice emphasizes the fact that a very important safety committee responsibility is to help the employer evaluate the SMS. The safety committee should also be able to write quality recommendations to improve the SMS.
Determine the Benchmark
To conduct an evaluation, we need to take the information gathered from the baseline survey and rate it against an established benchmark. A benchmark is a standard by which the system can be measured or judged, for instance, we might say XYZ's SMS is "a benchmark of quality" in our industry. In the optional modules of this course (Modules 5-12); you will be introduced to the OSHA Safety and Health Program Assessment Worksheet which may be used as a benchmark. This audit evaluates the same 58 elements of a SMS also used by OSHA to evaluate companies participating in the Safety and Health Achievement Program (SHARP). You may also be interested in using other evaluation standards as benchmarks such as:
We'll look at a simple example demonstrating how this works in the next section.
Knowledge Check Choose the best answer for the question.
4-4. This is a standard by which the system can be measured or judged.
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