Effectiveness of safety programme - management support

Appointment of safety officers is a mandatory requirement. When cost cutting is the mantra (rule) everywhere particularly when the company is not getting profits, how do a safety department head feels, if the management asks HR to take action for recruitment more personnel for safety department, that too, without any proposal from safety head.
It really shows the commitment of the management and this should motivate to do more. Doing routine inspections is one of the jobs. But, updating one's knowledge and foreseeing the hazards ahead and able to explain and convince the plant personnel is really the challenge for a safety officer. And, imagine if you can delegate routine inspections and is able to get time to study the processes in detail and analyze for hazards, what else is required. Definitely, this will give job satisfaction because your job is different from day-to-day jobs and you are doing special work. It will also make you an expert over a period of time and you can make your company a role model in the industry.
I always feel that the factories rules specifying one safety officer for every 1000 workers or so is insufficient even to do routine inspections for safety unless everybody in the shopfloor is committed to work safely. Otherwise, it will be like, catch me if you can, situation.
After certain age, even health will not permit a person to walk around throughout the day and his effectiveness in implementing safety will diminish.
Apart from safety inspections and pep talks in some companies, safety officer will also look after fire and environment duties, procure personal protective equipment, buy instruments, coordinate with different agencies like local authorities, factories department, pollution control board, explosives department, etc which will be taxing as he has to go their offices which can be far off and such works will reduce his attention on safety implementation.
I feel that there should be separate department for each of safety, environment, fire and welfare activities. And, one safety supervisor/officer should be available for every 10,000 square meters of shopfloor area or 250 employees (including contractors), whichever is less.
No  person should be allowed to enter shopfloor for any new work without safety briefing and work related training. Retraining should be provided atleast once in a year if the job is same. Class room training away from work area is preferable. Else, they will be called in between the training programme for any of the so called urgent works. Training programme should not pack many topics and should have one or two topics per day with theory, case studies, videos and evaluation/assessment. Participants too should be given sometime, say 45-60 minutes to speak on their experiences. Audience should be limited to 25-30. More participants means reduced attention from the faculty, less time available for the participants to interact and occasional arguments spoiling the course proceedings.