About This Course and What a Program Evaluation Is

This course teaches you how to evaluate a whole safety and health program against the model published by the US Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA): the Recommended Practices for Safety and Health Programs. It is written for health, safety and environment (HSE) managers, internal auditors and consultants who are asked a hard question by senior management: "Is our safety and health program actually working, and what should we fix first?"

The course is at intermediate level. It assumes you already know basic hazard identification and risk assessment, and that you can read an OSHA standard. It concentrates on judgement: which evidence to collect, how to weigh it, how to score it fairly and how to turn findings into an action plan that management will fund.

A program is more than a set of rules

A safety and health program is the organized way an employer finds and fixes hazards before they cause injury or illness. OSHA describes it as a proactive approach: management leads it, workers take part in it, hazards are found and controlled, people are trained, and the whole thing is checked and improved.

A program evaluation asks whether that system is in place, whether it works as intended, and whether it gets better over time. It is wider than a compliance check. A compliance check asks "Does this machine meet 29 CFR 1910.212?" An evaluation asks "Why did our system let an unguarded machine run for three months without anyone reporting it?"

How the course is organized

Module 1 sets out OSHA's model. Module 2 covers indicators, the numbers an evaluator reads. Module 3 plans an evaluation, Module 4 gathers evidence, and Module 5 evaluates each core element with examples of strong and weak evidence. Module 6 turns findings into root causes, a report and an action plan. Module 7 compares OSHA's model with ISO 45001 and ANSI/ASSP Z10 and works through one full evaluation case.