SH&E Program Management and Evaluation
What the exam is really testing
Program-management items ask you to separate the parts of a safety management system: policy and leadership commitment, a written program with defined roles and accountability, hazard identification and assessment, objectives and planning, implementation and controls, verification, and management review. Know the plan-do-check-act cycle and where ANSI/ASSP Z10 and ISO 45001 place each element. "Evaluation" is the check side of the loop: audits, inspections, incident data, perception surveys, and management review outputs.
Traps that show up
- Leading vs. lagging indicators. Lagging measures are outcomes: recordable case rate, DART rate, lost workdays, claims cost. Leading measures are activities and conditions: inspections completed, near-miss reports per employee, training hours delivered, audit findings closed on time. If an item asks for a proactive or predictive measure, a recordable injury count is never the answer.
- Rate denominators. Incidence rates are normally expressed per 200,000 hours worked (100 employees x 40 hours x 50 weeks). Some items use 100,000; use the base stated in the question.
- Inspection vs. audit. An inspection judges conditions on the floor; a system audit judges whether management processes function.
- EMR. An experience modification rate below 1.0 indicates better-than-average loss experience for the class.
Worked example
Four OSHA-recordable cases in a year with 620,000 hours worked: (4 x 200,000) / 620,000 = 1.29 recordables per 200,000 hours. Compare that to the industry benchmark before declaring the program effective.
Rule of thumb: a defensible objective names a metric, a target, an owner, and a date. "Improve safety culture" fails all four.