My new study: How Safety Audits are Superficially Trapped: An Assessment via the Hierarchy of Controls and Rasmussen’s Risk Management Framework

Are our safety audits improving paperwork over verifying effective safety systems?

Happy to share my first solo, non-PhD study which mapped 448 corrective actions from 65 health and safety audits, using the Hierarchy of Controls and Rasmussen’s Risk Management framework.

I found:

·        ~86% addressed ‘soft’ controls, e.g. admin & PPE, leaving just ~14% for ‘hard’ fixes, e.g. elimination, substitution, isolation or engineering controls

·        None of them targeted fixes above the project-level: “improvements at the site level stay at the site level”

·        Hence, I argue that audit fixes are ‘superficially trapped’ at the same level that they are observed – particularly around local paperwork and visible conditions, rather than stronger risk control measures and upstream organisational influences

·        Moreover, just 3.1% of all observations targeted the verification of field risk controls

Do audit corrective actions ‘need’ to focus on field risk controls? Is this a fair conclusion? Let me know your thoughts.

Check it out and please share. Shared under an open access licence.

PS. Check out my YouTube!

How Safety Audits are Superficially Trapped – finalDownload

#safetyaudits #riskmanagement #criticalcontrols #safetyscience #safety #iso45001

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Published by Ben Hutchinson

3 thoughts on “My new study: How Safety Audits are Superficially Trapped: An Assessment via the Hierarchy of Controls and Rasmussen’s Risk Management Framework”

  1. Hi Ben,

    I recently watched your webinar with Gregory Smith on The Role of Audits in WHS Assurance and really enjoyed the discussion, particularly when you spoke about your research into safety auditing and the emphasis audits place on soft controls.

    Your findings resonated with me because I have suspected much the same thing through my experience as a Certificate of Recognition (COR) auditor here in Canada. I conduct external safety management system audits across a number of industries, particularly construction, forestry, oil % gas, and related sectors, and the reliance on administrative or “soft” controls within audit criteria is quite striking. In construction, I would not be surprised if the proportion approached 99%.

    A somewhat crazy thought occurred to me. Given that we were both taught by Sidney Dekker, would you ever have any interest in collaborating on something in this area?

    Through my COR auditing work, I have contacts in Canada with several of the certifying partners that administer COR audit programs. There may be an opportunity to approach some of them about gaining access to a sufficiently large sample of anonymized audit reports and attempting to replicate or adapt your study in the Canadian COR context—particularly looking at the extent to which audit criteria and resulting corrective actions focus on soft versus harder controls.

    I think it could make for an interesting comparison with your research and potentially tell us something useful about what these audit systems are actually assuring.

    Best regards,

    Hayden Greenshields, CRSP, M.Sc. (T), (C)OHS, NCSO

    https://www.google.com/maps/search/2430+Ridgeview+Place+Prince+George,+BC+V2K+3Z3+Office:+1?entry=gmail&source=g 2430 Ridgeview Place

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    Phone: 250-960-9291

    Email: hayden@safetypays.ca hayden@safetypays.ca

    http://www.safetypays.ca/ http://www.safetypays.ca

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    1. Hey Hayden, sounds interesting! Be a cool project to explore auditing in the N. American context.

      PS – I wouldn’t hold my breath about the findings being too different though, as accident investigators (in my second audit study: https://doi.org/10.1002/prs.12579) criticised audits for largely the same reasons (and this was based primarily on US data, possibly similarish to the Canadian context?).

      Several European-focused audit studies also concluded similarly.

      But yeah, collaborating would be cool.

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      1. Yeah, I think there’s a goldmine of interesting research on safety audits that a person could explore. I just thought it would be neat to replicate yours in the Canadian context—then maybe I can use the results to convince the regulator that sponsors the COR program to abandon it altogether… lol.

        What’s your email address? I’ll send you a email and we can find a time to chat over Zoom or Teams and brainstorm some ideas in the future.

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