Plan Do Check Act: The PDCA Cycle in Health and Safety
The Plan Do Check Act cycle is a four-step process used to continually improve practices and procedures. It can be used in a range of professional settings to help set and achieve goals, helping organisations to meet targets and succeed.
The cycle was originally developed by Walter Shewhart in the 1920s before being modified by W. Edwards Deming 20 years later. With the constant priority that is health and safety, the Cycle can be a valuable tool for organisations of all sizes, as it provides a clear strategy and steps for improving health and safety practices. In this article, we’ll take you through each step of the PDCA cycle, explaining how it can be used to benefit your workplace. For each step we’ll discuss how the cycle can be applied to a health and safety setting, as well as what health and safety training courses can help your workplace with health and safety procedures.
What are the stages of the PDCA cycle?
The PDCA cycle is split into 4 stages:
Plan
Do
Check
Act
Each of these steps feed into the next, providing a continuing cycle of steps with which organisations can improve procedure and practices.
PDCA Cycle: Plan
The first step in the cycle is the plan, in which you describe the actions your team will take in the procedure or process.
When considering the plan within the context of health and safety, the procedure should consider health and safety legislation and best practice guidance. If the procedure you’re testing is your health and safety management system or part of it, the details should also be outlined in your organisation’s Health and Safety Policy. You should consider this plan in terms of your organisation’s health and safety goals too, as the plan should help achieve them and be designed with them in mind.
Your plan should:
Set objectives for your health and safety practices
Outline who is responsible for the different health and safety tasks in your organisation
Consult anyone who’ll be involved in carrying out the responsibilities, other health and safety advisors in your organisation, and key stakeholders, to make sure the plan caters to everyone’s needs
Be designed based on health and safety best practice and guidance
PDCA Cycle: Do
The Do step involves carrying out what you outlined in the plan. Sometimes it won’t go to plan the first time, so it’s important to have strategies in place to keep people safe, even if an incident occurs. You may encounter hurdles you hadn’t first considered when executing the plan or have ideas about how you could improve practices during the process too.
Because of this, it's often beneficial to implement your plan on a small scale the first time you try it. By doing so, you can keep the environment controlled and ensure the safety of your team even if something goes wrong. This won’t always be possible for complex plans such as health and safety management systems, and whatever the scale, it’s important to have emergency procedures in place to reduce the risk of incident, should something go wrong. When working with a process on a large scale, it can be helpful to break it down into smaller procedures and test those independently. This can help you spot any major issues before you test it as a whole, reducing the risk of accident and injury.
In an effective health and safety plan, you should consider including all of the following actions to reduce risk, especially when first carrying it out.
Risk Assessments
Providing Health and Safety Training
Safe Systems of Work
Emergency Procedures
PDCA Cycle: Check
After your plan has been implemented, or you come across an issue that needs addressing within it, you need to proceed on to the third step in the cycle- Check. This step requires you to re-evaluate your plan and consider what went right and wrong when it was carried out.
To effectively carry out the ‘check’ step, you need data to show how well the new plan performed compared to any existing ones, as well as the goals you set for it to meet. You may have collected this data during the ‘do’ step, as members of the team observed and monitored how successful the plan was when carried out. Or you might collect the data over a set period of time as you trial the new procedure and system. For larger plans such as health and safety management systems, this monitoring needs to be done consistently and include risk assessments, as this reduces the chance of faults in the new system leading to accident and injury.
Another key aspect of this step is, if any incidents occurred, determining what the root cause of them was and how this can be prevented in future. Near miss incidents should also be investigated, as they can expose similar issues, whether they be gaps in training or the need for specific control measures. At the end of the check step, you should have identified all the elements which need to be revised in the next version of the plan.
PDCA Cycle: Act
The final step of the PDCA cycle is Act. It involves taking the data you collected in the check step and applying it to the original plan you began with.
You may only make slight tweaks to the original plan, or you may rework whole sections and structures, but ultimately the goal is to make the process more effective when you next carry it out.
For a health and safety procedure, there are key considerations to make in terms of how you improve your system and process. You could:
Provide new training to those carrying out the procedure
Increase the frequency of risk assessments
Introduce new PPE or other safety measures to reduce risk
There are plenty of other elements which you may need to improve or alter. Throughout the whole process, keep your organisation’s health and safety goals in mind.
When can the PDCA cycle be used?
The PDCA Cycle can be used in any situation where a plan or procedure needs to be tested. It’s particularly useful when testing brand new procedures, for example when you create a new department in the organisation and need to create procedures for them. Or if you get a new piece of equipment on site that hasn’t been used by staff before. Using the PDCA Cycle can help you keep people safe and aid with the design of procedures.
How can the Plan Do Check Act cycle be used in health and safety?
Because it’s a general framework, the PDCA Cycle can be applied to any number of industries and situations, health and safety included. In this post, we’ve outlined the general application of the PDCA Cycle, though have touched on how elements of it can be used for health and safety management systems and safety procedures. This isn't the only area of health and safety where the cycle can be applied however, as it is also suitable for risk assessments, safe systems of work, and emergency evacuation procedures. The PDCA cycle can be used to test each of these procedures, continually improve them, and ultimately both raise and maintain high safety standards in the workplace.
To effectively use the PDCA Cycle for health and safety procedures, you need to have a competent health and safety person on hand. This person should have knowledge of health and safety legislation, best practices and risk assessments, allowing you to effectively improve your procedures using the PDCA Cycle.
At Phoenix, we offer a range of courses for those responsible for health and safety in the workplace. The NEBOSH General Certificate is the go-to qualification for any health and safety person getting their start in the industry. It covers the fundamentals of health and safety, including legislation, workplace wellbeing and how to carry out a risk assessment. By completing the qualification, individuals will have the skills needed to contribute to the design of health and safety procedures.
It can also be helpful to have multiple people on hand to conduct risk assessments, so your health and safety person isn’t spread too thin. Managers and Supervisors can study IOSH Managing Safely to learn how to conduct effective risk assessments, as well as all the key safety knowledge they need to keep their team safe. Those without management responsibilities can instead study our Risk Assessment training course, providing students with a detailed guide of how to conduct a risk assessment in just 90 minutes of e-Learning.
If you need advice on which health and safety courses are right for your organisation’s needs, contact a member of the Phoenix team today.