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OCCUPATIONAL HEALTH & SAFETY INSPECTIONS

What is an OH&S inspection?
OH&S inspections are planned, systematic, physical inspections of the workplace for the purpose of identifying hazards, assessing risks and controlling these risks. They involve observations, checklists and discussion, and can provide valuable information to help manage health and safety in the workplace.

Who can do an OH&S inspection?
Anybody can do an OH&S inspection. Ideally though, an inspection would involve a person from the area, a Workplace Health and Safety representative or OH&S committee member, and the supervisor of the area.

How do you complete an OH&S inspection?
OH&S inspections use a checklist to help identify hazards. These checklists provide an effective method of gathering information quickly and effectively. They can be tailored to the individual workplace, and modified as circumstances require.

An inspection may involve a walk-through of the entire workplace by the Workplace Health and Safety Representative, or entire committee. Alternatively the workplace may be divided amongst various committee members, Workplace Health and Safety Representatives or staff members.

Once hazards are identified solutions are to be put in place to ensure the hazard is controlled.

What type of OH&S inspection checklists are there?
A number of generic checklists are available based on different work environments. These may need to be customised to include all the risks in your specific workplace. They include:

I have completed an inspection, what next?
Once an inspection is completed, corrective actions must be agreed upon to solve each OH&S hazard identified. These corrective actions must have assigned a person responsible to fix the problem and a due date.

The Inspection Checklist, and agreed corrective actions, should be reviewed at the next Faculty OH&S committee meeting. For corrective actions which have not been completed, the Supervisor or Manager of the area involved should be consulted as to the time frame for completion of the problem.

Information
More information on identifying and managing risk can be found on the OHS Risk Analysis website.