Plan-Do-Check-Act Cycle

What is required at each stage of PLAN-DO-CHECK-ACT Or PDCA?
We’ll have a look at the theory at each stage and then see how to use the principles in practice by introducing a new piece of equipment.

PLAN
This stage covers two key issues: planning for implementation and policy. It is all about the P’s – PLANNING and POLICY.
Planning for implementation means identifying where we are now and then identifying where we want to be.
For example, we could be looking at introducing a new piece of equipment into our workplace. So what should we be considering at this stage?
How are we going to control the risks associated with this equipment?
What is the most suitable equipment from a safety perspective?
What emergency procedures need to be put in place?
What are the training requirements?
Is any personal protective equipment required?
During this stage we should also make sure that we are meeting the requirements of our organisation’s Health and Safety Policy.
DO
The do stage looks at three key areas:
Profiling the health and safety risks
Organising
Implementing your plans
So in reality what does this mean? 
Identifying the risks through suitable and sufficient risk assessment.
Organising by identifying roles and responsibilities, communication procedures and ensuring competent personnel are in place.
Implementation of the plan – ensuring risks are adequately controlled; correct maintenance procedures are in place and providing information, instruction, training and supervision to ensure people are competent and that procedures are followed.
So in our example of a new piece of equipment we need to do a suitable risk assessment that identifies the risks and controls required to minimise the risk to as low a level as is reasonably practicable. Identify roles and responsibilities for the use of the equipment. Ensuring all information and instruction on the use (daily, controls and maintenance) are provided so that all workers are competent in using the equipment as well as the safety procedures.
CHECK
This is an important stage. Once we have implemented our plan we need to ensure that it is working effectively. To achieve this we need to MEASURE PERFORMANCE. Good quality performance monitoring will help us to identify problems, understand why the problems arose, and understand what changes are necessary to resolve the issues.
How do we do this?
There are numerous ways that we can measure our performance. So for example, with our new piece of equipment we could introduce the following monitoring procedures:
Inspection of the plant and equipment carried out on a regular or scheduled basis
Job observations to check the effective operation of workplace precautions
Health surveillance, for example, audiometry tests for signs of hearing loss (if the equipment introduced is noisy)
Environmental monitoring, for example, measuring noise or dust levels
What we are doing must meet the levels we expect them to.
So what if it is not? Well we Act on our findings!
ACT
This is where we evaluate our health and safety performance to determine whether or not the essential principles of our plan and policy are being implemented correctly or whether there are improvements that can be made.
With our new piece of equipment, if we identify issues from our performance measurements in the check stage we will act upon them and remedy them. For example, after noise monitoring, should the machinery have noise levels above the legal requirements we would look at ways of addressing this. We then look at how we go about doing this; going through the Plan-Do-Check-Act cycle again.

The PDCA cycle is the basis of how we go about managing Health and Safety on not only a large scale but also it can be incorporated in to our day-to-day management of it.


Next Blog- Will be Continue with example of PDCA on current situation of CoVid-19, Labor migration and related Accidents on Railways tracks / Highways.

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