Description
One of the things that our staff takes great pride in is our ability to take the mystery out of Health & Safety Compliance in Ontario. It can be difficult for a business to decipher what the legislation says and what it means! We are here to help you better understand what safety and compliance may look like for your business. Industrial Safety Trainers offers a wide range of consulting services to meet the needs of your business.
On-Site Safety Inspections
Our Safety Consultants are experts at conducting safety inspections of any workplace.
Construction & Workplace Safety Inspections: These are planned for the most part in advance, but the planned sites may not know when we will show up. Once there, we will typically do the following if going to a construction project:
- Visit the construction trailer and check in with the project management team to see if there have been any issues with the team we are on-site to visit. If our client is managing the site and there is no constructor on site, we would meet with the company representative (supervisor) on site
- Visit the work area where the workers are observing the work being done before checking in with the workers.
- Check-in with a supervisor or team leads if on-site to discuss how the work is going and if there have been any accidents, incidents or near misses since our last visit. If there were any incidents, we would review those and discuss any follow-up that has been done or needs to be done. This would include reviewing if procedures were followed after an incident like this has happened.
- Check in with the workers to see if they have any safety concerns or ask them about their work and if they are following safe work practices.
- The whole time we talk with the workers and supervisors, we will assess the area and work being done to determine if it is being done safely.
- After a walk through the work area and speaking with as many persons as possible, we will find a spot-on site or in our vehicles and write up a report on our findings. Depending on the agreement we have with the client and the constructor, if one is involved, we may provide the constructor with a copy of the inspection report, but we will meet again with the supervisor on-site and provide that person with a copy of our report. We’ll discuss any action items that need to be taken.
- Before leaving the site, we ensure that we sign out if required
- Once back in our office, a copy of the report will be emailed to the employer with a summary description of the day’s events.
Other things we can do while on site would include:
- Accident/ incident investigations
- Training – safety talks, review of policy and procedure or whatever has been asked of us.
- Development of Fall protection/rescue plans
- Pre-Job Briefing or review of risk assessments with staff
- Review of document control/retention (safety inspections, risk assessments or pre-use inspections as an example)
Conducting Risk Assessment and Development of Safe Work Instructions
Trying to keep workers safe starts off with understanding what it is that can hurt them and others. Once you truly understand the hazard, you can then develop controls that will protect the workers. Those controls, in a lot of cases, would simply be the development of risk assessments and safe work instructions that describe the hazards, how to work safely with them, and what can be done to eliminate the risk.
Some businesses simply do not have the time to do these risk assessments and write safe work instructions. However, they know not doing it is costly; this is where one of our expert safety consultants can do the assessments on their behalf.
The benefit of bringing in a safety expert to do risk assessments and developing safe work instructions may include:
- That may need attention when conducting the risk assessments. For example, when writing a procedure to un-jam a machine, we may need to write a procedure for locking out the equipment.
- You have peace of mind knowing that someone with expert knowledge and experience has done the work.
- Every procedure is provided in a word document so that it can be modified as needed.
- We can train your workers on the safe work instructions that have been developed.