Health and Safety Part 2 – Risk Assessment Made Simple

Transcript

Support Cambridgeshire Guide to Risk Assessment Made Simple

Hello, my name is David Green from Green Pepper Consulting, and in this short training presentation, one of a series from Support Cambridgeshire, I will be looking at how we should conduct a safety risk assessment. Let’s begin…

Risk assessment involves identifying hazards, evaluating the risk they pose, and implementing measures to control or remove the risk. There are five steps to the process, so coming up, we will look at each of the steps in turn.

What is a hazard?

But first, what exactly do we mean by a hazard?

Well, a hazard is anything that can cause harm.

This might be something that can harm a person’s physical health. Or something that can harm mental health, such as stress.

Why assess risk?

It is perhaps obvious, but to clarify, we assess risk to:

• understand what safety measures are needed
• help prevent accidents and occupational diseases
• meet our legal duties

Risk assessment is a requirement of many safety regulations and is a key aspect of health and safety management.

What’s more, a failure to assess risk might result in injury or illness to someone, leaving the organisation open to compensation claims and even prosecution.

To help you with the risk assessment process, there are links in the accompanying transcript of this video to a safety inspection checklist and to a risk assessment form.

Ok, let’s now look at:

Step one of risk assessment – identifying the hazards

You do this by inspecting the workplace, ideally, with a staff rep or colleague, and then by speaking to your staff and volunteers about their work.

We want to find out about different tasks, the equipment, the methods they use, and the environment in which they work. By looking at the workplace and speaking to your team at work, you can identify any hazards that they may face.

You will need to look for anything that might cause harm, something, for example, that could cause a trip, slip or fall. There could be manual handling hazards, objects stacked up high that could topple over, chemicals, noise, risk of violence and so on.

Because hazards can differ so widely, sometimes it helps to use a safety inspection checklist when looking around your workplace.

For those who work remotely, such as lone workers and home workers, it may not be possible to inspect how they work. But by discussing working methods with the individuals concerned, prompting and asking them about their safety concerns, you can together work out the likely hazards.

Step two of risk assessment – decide who might be harmed, and how

Step two of risk assessment considers who might be harmed, and how…

Look for anyone who could be harmed by the hazards you identify and how this could happen, including when and where.

Those affected might include members of your team, whether staff or volunteers, including homeworkers, and lone workers. Also, your beneficiaries and other visitors to the workplace.

Think also about any special groups who might be more vulnerable to particular harm and may need additional support, such as new or expectant mothers, or people with disabilities.

It might also include those who may have communication difficulties, such as people who don’t have English as a first language.

Once you know who can be harmed, decide how and when it could happen.

Together, the who, how, and when will give you the likelihood of something causing harm.

Step three – evaluate the risk and introduce safety control measures

Step three has two parts. Firstly, to evaluate the risk, and secondly, to introduce safety control measures.

We evaluate risk by combining the likelihood of the hazard, which we have worked out from step two, with the severity of the hazard.

But what if we need to find out more about the hazard before deciding how severe or dangerous it can be?

We can do this by looking up the hazard on the Health and Safety Executive website, and then consulting the manufacturer’s handbook, data sheet or their own website.

So something that has a high degree of severity and a moderate to high likelihood of occurring would be a high-risk hazard.

Once you have evaluated a hazard, you can put in place safety control measures.

Always consider the most effective measure first. Your starting point should always be to try and remove the risk altogether. (For example, although you could warn people about a slippery surface, the best remedy would be to remove the slippery surface and replace it with a safe one).

If this isn’t possible, then see if there is some less risky way of doing the same thing, for example, using a different technique or with different equipment or substances.

Other measures might be to reduce access to the risk (such as cutting the time someone is exposed to the risk, or perhaps using a smaller pool of people). Or to use personal protective equipment.

Finally, make sure your team is trained on how to use your control measures and that they receive clear instructions on how to mitigate the risk. It’s very important they understand the nature of the risk and why the control measures are necessary.

Step four – record your findings

We now come to Step four, which is to record your findings. One of the simplest ways is in the form of a table. This is the information you will want to record…

• the hazard
• who might be harmed
• how they might be harmed
• current control measures
• any new control measures needed
• who is responsible (for action)

Step five – monitor and review your risk assessment

The final and fifth step is to monitor and review your risk assessment. This will involve periodically checking that the control measures you have implemented are being used properly and that they are effective.

Any shortfalls should prompt a review of the risk assessment, and possibly result in new control measures (or better management of the ones you already have in place and perhaps better training.

You should also review your risk assessment if there is an accident or if new information about the hazard or activity becomes available.

So we are almost to the end of this video. Contact information and details of other training videos in this series follow.

Summary of the risk assessment process

1. Identify the hazards
2. Decide who might be harmed and how
3. Evaluate and control the risk
4. Record your findings
5. Monitor and review

Thank you for watching.

Guidance links