Assessment of the management quality of the occupational health and safety at the extraction department of the coal mine, current condition and forecasts—case study

The audit of the Occupational Health and Safety (OHS) management system is an integral constituent part of every management system of occupational health and safety management system. One of its implementation forms involves the Management Evaluation Regarding Itemized Tendencies (MERIT) survey which facilitates the assessment of OHS quality through the determination of changing tendencies within the frame of nine problem areas. Basing on the liner trend function and on the method of crawling trends and harmonic weights, the paper presents the application potentials of the MERIT survey for the description of changes and for the forecast of the assessment indexes (the partial assessment indexes for the particular problem areas WOPi and the final assessment index WZBP). The applied methods enabled to determine the directions of changes within the scope of the applied policy involving the management of occupational health and safety, which may be useful for corrective actions to be undertaken by the coal mine in the future. In the paper we used the results of the audit carried out in the years 2013–2016 at the extraction department G1 of the coal mine.