The WHAT, WHY & HOW of Risk Assessments

Risk assessments are required under the Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations 1999, plus a part of Section 2 (2) of the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974 (HASAWA) when providing a safe place of work and access and egress to it.

Section 2 (2) (a) of HASAWA requires Employers to provide and maintain plant and systems of work that are, so far as is reasonably practicable, safe and without risks to health.

As a requirement of the Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations 1999 risks need to be sufficiently assessed and published for all company operations.

The risks relate to those that can affect employees and also any other person who might be affected by them, i.e. contractors, visitors, casual staff and the general public.

Risk Assessments can be Qualitative (i.e. providing descriptions of risks) but this generally doesn’t allow for priorities to be set as regards to any remedial actions taken but Management.

Risk Assessments can be most effective when they are Quantitative (i.e. having some for form of ranking/scoring mechanism) so that the most serious risks can be countered quickly and effectively.

Additional information relating to some of the definitions, legislation and concepts used in the Risk Assessment process are given in the ‘Explanatory Notes’ section at the end oof this document.

The Risk Assessment is based on factors that are reasonably foreseeable and control measures have been used to reduce those risks to as low as is reasonably practicable.

The Health and Safety Executive document ‘5 Steps to Risk Assessment’ lays out a framework for the steps required to perform risk assessments. These steps are:

a.     Identify the Hazards

b.     Decide who may be harmed

c.     Evaluate the risk and decide on precautions

d.     Record your findings

e.     Review and update the assessment.

So how to begin?

Firstly Identify the Hazards, this involves looking at your operations and processes to identify where harm could be caued if the process is not accurately followed.

Look around your workplace and think about what may cause harm (these are called hazards). Think about:

• How people work and how plant and equipment are used

• What chemicals and substances are used

• What safe or unsafe work practices exist

• The general condition of your premises

All these areas contain opportunities for interraction and can, in some cases, introduce hazards into the operations performed.

This will give you an opportunity to identify what could go wrong and who may be harmed as a result.

The risks will be need to be quantitatively assessed with a scoring and ranking system to identify which require further action and which will only need monitoring

Having evaluate the risk, you will now be able to put 'reasonably practicable' control measures in place.

The Health and Saety Executive use the standard Risk Control Hierarchy which identifies the actions to be taken to and the order in which to take them. It involves:

1. ELIMINATION

2. SUBSTITUTION

3. ENGINERING CONTROLS

4. ADMINISTATION CONTROLS

5. PERSONAL PROTECTIVE CLOTHING

The Risk Control Hierarchy shows the way risks can be managed with the most efficient method being elimination, as this completely removes the risk.

If this is not possible then a company should use the following methods in descending order to reduce the risks so far as is reasonably practicable.

A variety of forms have been developed to record the assessment and to help the assessor note down the required information. In most cases the forms will need to identify:

• The nature of the Process or Task

• Who may be harmed, including visitors and members of the public. It here what thought needs to be given to vulnerable workers

• The nature of harm that could be suffered

• The initial assessment without controls covering:

• frequency of the exposure to the risk

• The severity of the injury/illness caused

• The total of the frequency x severity, which equals the level of risk

• The controls required to mitigate the risk

• The assessment with the controls in place covering the revised frequency and severity, which produces the residual risk.

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      RISK MATRIX SCORING MECHANISM

Likelihood	Rare (1)	Unlikely (2)	Possible (3)	Likely (4)	Almost Certain (5)
Severity
Catastrophic (5)	5	10	15	20	25
Major (4)	4	8	12	16	20
Moderate (3)	3	6	9	12	15
Minor (2)	2	4	6	8	10
Negligible (1)	1	2	3	4	5

Having decided on the level of ranking for each risk you can then decide which risk levels need further action and which need only monitoring.

But remember, things change and so the risks will need to be re-evaluated at a pre-determined timescale