Safety Program Management and Administration
The Safety Program Management and Administration domain tests whether you can build, resource, and measure an occupational health and safety (OHS) management system, not just deliver one-off fixes. Expect items on policy and leadership, defined roles and accountability, written program elements, contractor control, management of change (MOC), audits, and performance metrics.
The system skeleton
Most items map to a Plan-Do-Check-Act loop that mirrors the ISO 45001 clause structure: context (4), leadership and worker participation (5), planning (6), support (7), operation (8), performance evaluation (9), improvement (10). ANSI/ASSP Z10 is the main U.S. consensus counterpart. The anchors examiners look for:
- A written policy signed by the most senior manager, with measurable objectives.
- Line management owns the risk in its area; the safety professional advises, coaches, and audits, and does not 'own' the hazard.
- Document control, training records, and a corrective-action register with named owners and due dates.
Measuring performance
- Lagging indicators: TRIR, DART rate, severity rate, claims cost. Easy to compute, slow to warn.
- Leading indicators: inspections completed on schedule, near-miss reports per 100 workers, audit findings closed on time, percentage of JHAs current.
- The OSHA incidence rate base is 200,000 hours, meaning 100 full-time-equivalent workers at 40 hours for 50 weeks: rate = (cases x 200,000) / hours worked.
Worked example
A distribution center logs 480,000 employee-hours, 3 OSHA-recordable cases, and 1 case with days away or restricted activity. TRIR = (3 x 200,000) / 480,000 = 1.25. DART = (1 x 200,000) / 480,000 = 0.42. Suppose JHA reviews are 40 percent overdue and near-miss reports are falling while injuries rise. The defensible diagnosis is under-reporting plus stale risk assessments, and the fix is a reporting-culture intervention with refreshed JHAs, not another PPE order.
Traps that cost marks
- Naming the safety manager as accountable owner of every hazard.
- Mixing first-aid cases into recordable counts when computing rates.
- Using 2,000 instead of 200,000 as the rate multiplier.
- Answering 'management commitment' without a measurable mechanism such as objectives, a budget line, MOC, or audit.