Development of a Health and Safety Performance Measurement Tool

Description

Publisher: Health and Safety Executive (HSE Books) , ISBN 0717619060, Published 2000, 223 pages.Description:The Health and Safety Executive (HSE) identified the need for a Tool to measure health and safety performance/improvement over time within a sector. It was intended that the Tool wouldbe used by inspectors within Small and Medium Sized Enterprises (SMEs).Amey VECTRA believe that the Tool that has been developed is a useful addition to the existingHSE Inspection Rating System, which will provide an assessment of sector wide performance on a year-on-year basis. It is suggested that the Tool is used at two levels; using randomly selected premises (approximately 50) which are compared year-on-year as a reflection of the total sector and as a case study of 10-12 premises which go back to each year as a mini parallel study.The assessment should be a ‘snapshot’ of the health and safety performance at that time and any plans made by the company should not be included. However, when feedback of the assessment findings are presented to the company, the inspector may feel that it is appropriateto consider any plans that the company may have made when they are scoring certain Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) in order to motivate the company.The development process involved the creation of a health and safety Key Performance Indicator (KPI) Framework on which the Tool itself could be based. The decision was made to build the framework for the Performance Indicators around existing legal requirements, mainly to avoid the problem of what expectations it is realistic to have of SMEs. Therefore it was decided that the ‘spine of the Framework’ would be based on the Risk Assessment requirements, under the Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations.The Tool was trialed by inspectors and researchers working together in order to check consistency. Modifications were made to the Tool based on the feedback from the inspectors and observations by the researchers before a final trial was carried out. The final trial was completed to ensure that the final version of the Tool was practical. A final set of improvementswas made following this trial.This report and the work it describes were funded by the HSE. Its contents, including any opinions and/or conclusions expressed, are those of the author alone and do not necessarily reflect HSE policy.