Safety Inspection Checklists are a paper or digitized document utilized by safety officers to aid in inspecting and highlighting workplace hazards that may cause detrimental harm to individuals, employees, processes, and the surrounding environment.

A Safety Inspection Team can consist of engineers, maintenance personnel, health and safety professionals, and supervisors or managers to aid in setting/ follow-up action controls. These individuals should be well-versed with regulations and procedures, intel on potential hazards, and have ample experience with work procedures involved.

It is important to note that Safety Inspection Checklists play a vital role in periodically scanning the workplace for potential occupational hazards and is an important factor in the occupational health and safety program of a corporation. During the process of conducting safety inspections, an expert safety officer meticulously ticks away checkboxes, which aids them in identifying and documenting work-related hazards, injuries, and illnesses. Through this, innovation occurs through the medium of preventive controls to eradicate the hazard and helps in record-keeping during safety audits to ensure that safety standards are upheld to the highest degree.

Safety Inspection Checklists are differentiated by their work environment and safety inspectors must take into consideration various variables, duties, and risks-posed when framing a Safety Checklist for a site or facility. Some types of Safety Inspection Checklists are:

• OSHA Safety Inspection Checklist – helps your organization measure its safety program in relation to the standards of OSHA. The checklist includes all general industry safety categories which help you to locate and deal with uncompromising standards in the working environment.
• Construction Safety Inspection Checklist – structured to record prevalent hazards in the construction industry such as potential or present defects in fall-protection, PPE, scaffolding, elevated spaces, evacuation protocols, and more.
• Machinery Safety Inspection Checklist – assess and determine the overall safety status of machinery and equipment in the workplace. This will help in highlighting mechanical, electrical and maintenance hazards thus reducing the probability of injury or harm due to inadequate machine guards, unsafe pre-operation checks, improper LOTO, and more.

The scheduling of safety inspections depends on several factors such as:

• Organizations past incident records
• The number of work operations
• The risk level that may arise from the type of equipment utilized
• New processes or machinery bringing forth new or unknown hazards
• Environmental conditions or any other underlying threats

Ideally, the intervals in which safety inspections should be conducted should be as regular as safety meetings. It is highly recommended to separate the safety inspections and meetings by at least one week to give ample time for teams to implement control actions and focus on areas that are requiring assistance.

Furthermore, the advantages of using a Safety Inspection Checklist are that they are an important part of Environment Health and Safety Software (EHS) and are a vital tool to ensure that the working environment adheres to safety standards. These health and safety inspections allow you to: determine the direct cause of potential hazards in the workplace, form a solution to eliminate hazards, gather insights and understanding of tasks that you have limited experience with, and understand the queries of your workforce and supervisors.

How To Create and Use Safety Inspection Checklists – Talent Corps

If you are looking to create your own and need some assistance or need to hire a safety professional, Talent Corps is here to assist you in the process.

Have any questions?  Please reach out to us today.

This article is part of a series on Strengthening America’s Workforce