Help Protect Your Organization with a Safety Management System

A Safety Management System (SMS) is a system developed within your organization that is intended to collect important information about the risk of abuse and send it to different levels within the organization.

Collecting and evaluating the right information about program operation can help identify the following:

• High-risk programs or individuals
• Where increased monitoring, supervision and training or policy changes may be needed
• Whether the program should even continue
• Complaints from employees, volunteers or participants
• Serious or frequent incidents
• Violations noted by external licensing bodies
• Potential gaps in safety programs

Implementing Safety Management System

An SMS is critical to your organization’s success in abuse prevention since it helps take a proactive stance versus a reactive stance. By taking these steps, you’re not waiting for abuse to occur. Instead, you’re taking action to prevent the abuse from occurring in the first place.

Best practices for your SMS can include the following:

• Mechanisms for reporting concerns, complaints and grievances. Include an anonymous method.
• Eliminate barriers to reporting.
• Collect and analyze data related to preventing abuse.

These practices depend on critical steps in collecting “high quality” data that must be completed in the best manner possible and on a consistent and ongoing basis.