Glossary of EHS, occupational safety and QHSE terms

An LMRA is a few-minute assessment that the crew performs at the workplace before picking up tools. It does not duplicate the formal risk assessment; it verifies that the conditions on site match the assumptions: the area is secured, energy sources are isolated, weather and lighting allow the work, and no conflicting activity is running nearby.

A good LMRA ends with one of three decisions: start, start after adding a control, or stop. Simplicity is critical — if the form takes longer than three minutes, crews stop using it.

CAPA separates two different kinds of response. A corrective action removes the cause of a nonconformity or event that has already happened. A preventive action removes the cause of a problem that has not happened yet but has been identified as plausible — during an audit, for example, or from a trend in reports.

A mature CAPA process always has four elements: a named owner, a due date, evidence of completion, and an effectiveness review after an agreed period. Without the last one, the CAPA register becomes a list of closed tasks that says nothing about whether the problem actually went away.

5 Why means asking “why” of each successive answer until you reach a cause the organisation can actually influence. Five is a convention — sometimes three steps are enough, sometimes seven are needed. The analysis only works when each “why” addresses the work system rather than a person.

The most common mistake is stopping at “the worker was not careful”. That describes behaviour, not cause. The next question should be: why was that behaviour possible, why was it not detected, and why did the safeguard fail.

A safety data sheet is supplied by the manufacturer or distributor of a substance or mixture. It follows a fixed structure of sixteen sections: identification and hazards, emergency response, exposure controls, toxicological data and transport information.

In practice, a plant relies most on sections 2, 4, 7, 8 and 13: hazards, first aid, storage, personal protective equipment and waste handling. The sheet must be current and available to the worker at the point of use — not only in a binder in the safety office.

Management of change means that every significant change — new equipment, a different raw material, a staffing change, a modified installation — is assessed for its effect on safety, quality and environment before it is implemented. The assessment ends with a decision by an authorised person and a list of conditions to meet.

Temporary changes are a separate category because they are the ones that escape control: a provisional bypass or a substitute material can stay in the plant for years. A temporary change should therefore carry an expiry date and a review reminder.

A permit to work authorises a higher-risk task — hot work, confined space entry, work at height, or work on live or pressurised systems — once the required controls are confirmed to be in place and verified.

The permit links three roles: the requester, the authorising person and the performer. It has a limited scope and validity period, and after the work is finished it must be formally closed, with the installation returned to normal and the area checked.

A near miss is free information about a gap in your controls. A dropped object that hit nobody, a slip without a fall, a machine started with a guard open — each shows a mechanism that, with slightly different timing, would have caused an injury.

Organisations with a mature safety culture want the near miss count to go up, not down: a rising number usually signals rising trust rather than deteriorating conditions. That requires fast feedback to the reporter and no consequences for reporting.

PDCA is the backbone of most management systems, including ISO 45001 and ISO 9001. Plan covers objectives and resources, do is implementation, check is measurement and audit, and act is adjusting the plan based on the results.

In plant practice the weakest link is usually “check”: actions are implemented quickly, but nobody comes back a quarter later to verify the effect. It is worth having the system trigger the effectiveness review rather than relying on the owner's memory.

An occupational exposure limit is the maximum permitted concentration of a chemical or dust in workplace air, or the maximum permitted intensity of a physical agent such as noise, vibration or electromagnetic fields. Both relate to a defined exposure period.

Measurement results are compared against these values to establish the exposure ratio. That ratio drives how often the next measurements are required, the scope of health surveillance, and whether additional controls must be introduced.

Lockout/tagout protects against unexpected start-up or release of stored energy during maintenance. Every energy source — electrical, pneumatic, hydraulic, gravitational — is isolated, locked and tagged with the name of the person responsible.

The procedure ends with a try-out to confirm the isolation worked. Only the person who applied a lock may remove it, after confirming that nobody is at the machine and guards are back in place.