Role of a Safety Professional

The safety professional is often the driving force in a company for including safety decisions during design stages. The safety professional must work to make Valuable Safety by Design (VSD). The design of the workplace and work methods can be influenced during the pre-operational design process, operational mode, as well as post-incident. It is always best to create VSD in the pre-operational stage where costs are lowest for risk and hazard avoidance, elimination, or control. While in the operational stage of a company risks, hazards, or concerns should be addressed and fixed (if possible) before any potential incidents occur. It is a goal to not have any incident to occur, but as it most likely will, the safety professional(s), management, or appointed investigator(s) should be discovering the root causal factor of the incident. Once the cause(s) have been realized, the safety professional should promptly work on fixing the cause so that the incident or any similar incident does not occur again. Having quality management, hazard control, safety standards, as well as enforcing the safety standards will ultimately lower the company's cost either directly or indirectly.