Safety Management Systems

Safety management system (SMS) is a comprehensive management system designed to manage safety elements in the workplace. It includes policy, objectives, plans, procedures, organisation, responsibilities and other measures. The SMS is used in industries that manage significant safety risks, including aviation, petroleum, chemical, electricity generation and others.

An SMS provides a systematic way to identify hazards and control risks while maintaining assurance that these risk controls are effective. SMS can be defined as:

...a businesslike approach to safety. It is a systematic, explicit and comprehensive process for managing safety risks. As with all management systems, a safety management system provides for goal setting, planning, and measuring performance. A safety management system is woven into the fabric of an organization. It becomes part of the culture, the way people do their jobs.

For the purposes of defining safety management, safety can be defined as:

... the reduction of risk to a level that is as low as is reasonably practicable.

There are three imperatives for adopting a safety management system for a business – these are ethical, legal and financial.

There is an implied moral obligation placed on an employer to ensure that work activities and the place of work to be safe, there are legislative requirements defined in just about every jurisdiction on how this is to be achieved and there is a substantial body of research which shows that effective safety management (which is the reduction of risk in the workplace) can reduce the financial exposure of an organisation by reducing direct and indirect costs associated with accident and incidents.

To address these three important elements, an effective SMS should:

A safety management system can be created to fit any business type and/or industry sector.

Since there are many models to choose from to outline the basic components of a safety management system, the one chosen here is the international standard promoted by the International Labour Organization (ILO). In the ILO document, the safety management basic components are:

Although other SMS models use different terminology, the process and workflow for safety management systems are usually similar;

A SMS is intended to act as a framework to allow an organisation, as a minimum, to meet its legal obligations under occupational safety and health law. The structure of a SMS is generally speaking, not of itself a legal requirement but it is an extremely effective tool to organise the myriad aspects of occupational safety and health (OSH) that can exist within an organisation, often to meet standards which exceed the minimum legal requirement.

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