The purpose of conducting Safety Audit is to systematically review and examine the department's safety efforts and the results to determine whether they conform to the planned arrangements and whether these arrangements are implemented effectively and are suitable for achieving the department's safety policy and goals.

This Scheme is developed as a tool to help management of individual units to review the effectiveness of their health and safety management efforts, and to identify areas where enhancements are needed.

The Audit Scheme is developed based on the established Departmental Health and Safety Management Guide and other established health and safety practices at HKUST. You should make reference to this "Management Guide" (appropriate hyperlinks are established for easy cross-reference) when conducting the Audit. 

The Audit can  be divided into 2 levels. The first level will be on “general health and safety management arrangements” (also called Management Audit), whereas the second level will be on “specific health and safety control arrangements or programs” (also called Technical Audits) which may be different for different units.

The Audit Questionnaire

• The Audit will be conducted with the aid of a set of comprehensive questionnaire, covering relevant aspects or areas of the activities of the department/office/unit being reviewed.
• The questions are so designed that "yes" answers are expected. If a "no" answer is given to a particular question, the actions for the respective management will simply be to make appropriate arrangements to get a "yes" answer for the question.

The conduct of the Audit should comprise three major aspects of efforts, namely: Documentation review, Physical Inspections of selected activities and workplaces, and Interviews with selected personnel.

The Audit should focus mainly on “up-stream” management efforts and arrangements for ensuring that all major hazards can be identified and controlled in an effective manner. The physical conditions in the workplaces should also be inspected (selectively) for verification purpose.