Ep 2: Risk Assessments

Hello, you’re listening to the Praxis42 Health and Safety Made Simple podcast with me, Tom Moon. Each episode, we take a different health and safety topic, break it down, cut out the jargon and put it into plain English, with the aim of making it easier to understand and easier to implement. Today we’re talking risk assessments. Let’s get stuck into it.

If you’re tuning into this, you either have an interest in health and safety, or you need to find out how to complete a risk assessment for your work.

So, what is a risk assessment and why do we need to complete them?

Let’s deal with why first and tackle the legal stuff. As an employer, you must control the risks in your workplace and you’re trying to avoid two things: harm or ill-health being suffered by persons who you directly employ or people who might be affected by your actions, such as visitors, contractors, or guests, or anyone in the immediate vicinity that could be affected by your work processes.

These underlying principles are set out in the Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations 1999, which require risk assessments to be completed. So, if risk assessments aren’t completed, you’d be in breach of the law, leaving yourself open to enforcement action, and let’s face it, that’s not good for reputation or business.

Stepping away from the legal side, there’s a moral reason for an employer to complete risk assessments. Every employer has a duty of care to their employees and any other person who could be affected by their work activities, and that duty is to ensure they are looked after and do not come to harm. The risk assessment process is going to allow an employer to highlight where the possible dangers are, and then implement ways to reduce the chance of harm occurring. So that covers the why.

Let’s look at what a risk assessment is. Well, in simple terms, it’s a process of thinking about, what might cause harm to people and taking action to prevent that harm from occurring.

Step 1 is to identify what will cause the harm, and anything that has the potential to cause harm is classified as a hazard. These can be categorised as follows:

• Physical Hazards – so things like machinery, objects, and tools.
• Biological Hazards – things such as viruses.
• Chemical Hazards – so liquids, fumes and dust.
• Ergonomic Hazards – so looking at how we interact with our workstation, or our equipment.
• Psychosocial Hazards – so we’re looking at psychological and social behaviours.

To be able to identify all the hazards involved, you need to have a good understanding of what is going on and look at all aspects of the work activities, or the work environment. This will involve looking at: The people involved in the work, their ability, their skill, their knowledge. The work environments themselves, so is it indoor or outdoor work, temperature, lighting, ventilation, or noise. The equipment being used. The products involved, such as chemicals. And the work process as a whole which is being conducted.

Now we have a better understanding of what hazards could be involved, the question is, how are you going to identify them all?

Well, when it comes to this, there’s no right or wrong way and you can employ whatever method you feel is most appropriate, as long as it’s comprehensive in the information it gathers. It can involve, for example, your own knowledge of a task or a piece of equipment. If you’ve completed the job for a number of years, you will have gained a wealth of knowledge and experience of it and you will know how you could potentially get hurt and what could cause the harm.

These will enable you to identify trends and may help you see where accidents are commonly happening within a work process or where they keep happening within a workplace. Simple walk arounds of the workplace and seeing the job happening first-hand, will enable you to see where the potential harm could occur.

Talking to people who complete the work, get their perspective on what could cause them harm or where they could get hurt. Look to the manufacturers of equipment and the products you use, as they do a lot of hard work for you and they’ll tell you where the harm could occur.

A simple example could be a manufacturer making a delivery to your place of work. On the side of the box it states ‘Heavy item. 2 person lift’. Immediately, you can see if you ask 1 person to do the lift, harm could occur. And lastly, look to industry guidance. These could be recommended ways to complete tasks or products to use or equipment to use to enable you to do whatever the job is in a safe way. So like we said, there’s no real right or wrong way, as long as all reasonably foreseeable hazards are identified.

Now there’s our first bit of health and safety jargon, reasonably foreseeable. What does this mean? In basic terms, any reasonable person will be able to see that harm could occur. For example, there’s a spillage of liquid on the floor. Now is it reasonable to think if you walk through it, you could slip? Yes it is. However, on the other side, you’re not expected to include unforeseeable hazards. So for example, taking into account unexpected weather conditions or weather changes.

Having worked out what or where the harm will occur, we now have to look at, who could be harmed? We have to be wide ranging when it comes to this and consider all persons who could be either on the premises or affected by our work processes. This will involve looking at your own employees, workers from another employer, e.g. contractors coming on site, members of the public or visitors that could be in close proximity to the work you’re completing or on your premises.

Right, let’s take a maintenance company working on a scaffold as an example, they’ve identified falling objects are hazard. Now, depending on where they’re completing this work will determine who could be harmed. If the work is completed in an isolated location, then it may only be their employees working at ground level that could be affected. But if the work is taking place in the city centre, then it’s not only their own employees that need to be considered, but also members of the public that could be passing underneath. Don’t fall into the trap of only considering your own employees.

So far, we now have our hazards, the things that are going to cause harm, and identified who could be harmed. The next stage is to calculate the risk. To do this, we’ve got to go back to school and do some sums. There’s a basic calculation to work out risk, and this is Risk = Likelihood x Severity.

So let’s break that calculation down to the 2 components: Likelihood – so this refers to how likely harm could occur from a hazard you’ve identified. This is determined on a scale, for example, it could range from extremely unlikely, remote chance of it happening, could happen occasionally, it’s probable to happen, or it’s extremely likely. Each of these can be given a rating of one to five ( 1 being extremely unlikely to 5 being extremely likely).

The scoring of this will always be a subjective judgement based on experience and knowledge, so it’s a good idea to get different people’s opinions. This might be colleagues, employees completing the task, or sometimes an expert opinion.

Let’s look at a basic example. Let’s take a pothole is the hazard, it has the potential to cause harm for a person tripping in it. Now, if the pothole would have been a busy pavement in a city centre, what would be the likelihood of harm occurring. Using our scale, you would probably rate it as extremely likely, given the high footfall, giving it a score of 5. If the pothole however, was located on a back street not used by members of public, the likelihood would be considerably lower.

Now let’s look at the harm and this is calculated the same way. The scale this time, maybe something along the lines of negligible injury, minor injury, moderate injury, significant injury, and severe. And again, these are given a rating from 1 to 5, least harm to most harm.

Let’s go back to our pothole example, we’ve scored it a 5 for likelihood, and if you were to trip on it, then you could injure yourself quite badly. So let’s go worst case scenario, and you do trip and you break your wrist. Using the scale we’ve just discussed, this will be a significant injury, giving you a harm rating of 4. Now we can calculate the risk that pothole poses. We’ve got 5 for likelihood x 4 for severity, giving us a risk rating of 20.

Now using this process, the next stage will be to rate each of the hazards you’ve identified, giving each a severity rating of 1 to 5, and a likelihood rating of 1 to 5. And with these numbers, you have the ability to calculate the risk. So what you should now have is a list of hazards, each with a numerical risk value assigned to it and straight away this will allow you to rank them from high to low, thus making it easy to identify where the risks are in your workplace or within the work process. These risks are known as your significant risks.

We’ve established what the hazards are, who could be harmed, and the risks posed to those people. Now we need to look at controlling the risks and reducing it so far as is reasonably practicable. Now here’s our second bit of jargon. Let’s tackle that and find out what it means.

This is one of the most common phrases you’ll hear in health and safety. “So far as is reasonably practicable”. In basic terms, it means cost versus risk. The best way to look at it is like a set of weighing scales. On one side, we have the risk and on the other side, we have time, the cost, the effort and the resources needed to reduce that risk to an acceptable level.

As an employee, you must be seen to be taking all reasonable steps to balance those scales. Let’s take a low risk hazard. Do we need to be investing high levels of time, money, effort and resources into controlling it? No. Something simple could suffice to reduce the risk, like changing a cleaning chemical to one that isn’t as hazardous.

On the other hand, if you have a high risk hazard, then this will warrant more investment into it to reduce the risk. This might be things such as new equipment, employees being trained or physical changes to the workplace itself.

To reduce the risk we need to introduce control measures and these must be able to do one of three things:

• Firstly, eliminate the hazard altogether. A great example of this is window cleaners. Nowadays, you’ll see window cleaners using extendable poles to reach the top floor of their building, rather than having to go up on a ladder, where there’s the risk of they could fall and seriously hurt themselves. This is an ideal solution, but it’s not always possible and sometimes it’s the most expensive.
• So then we need to look at reducing the likelihood of harm occuring. You may look to reduce the amount of time a person spends completing a task, the less time they do it, the less likely they are to be harmed.
• Lastly, we need to look to try and reduce the harm. So this might be something simple, like changing a chemical to one that is less harmful. It may take some time to find the best control measures to implement and in fact, additional controls may need to be introduced, if the first didn’t bring the risk rating down low enough. So this stage may take some time and thought to get right. But what you need to see is once you’ve introduced the control measures and recalculated the risk, the risk rating is now lower than when you started.

So we’re nearly at the end of the process. We’ve now gathered a wealth of information, the next stage is to record our findings. So what’s the best way to do this? Again, there’s no right or wrong way and this is down to you, but some key points need to be considered. Whatever format you decide, it must allow all key information from each stage of the assessment to be recorded.

Most importantly, it must be easy to understand, because don’t forget your employees need to read this document, understand it and follow it. Too often people think more is better, and in doing so, key information gets lost within the document. I commonly get asked, “Do I need to document my risk assessments?” No, not necessarily.

If you have fewer than 5 employees, there is no legal obligation to document your risk assessments. But this raises the question, if you’re not documenting your risk assessments, how can you demonstrate you’re managing the risk effectively? You may be hard pushed, and some types of work are still high risk, even if you only have 4 employees. So it’s always good to document the risk assessments in some form or another.

Okay, we’ve reached the final stage and this is a vital part of the process. It’s the review of your risk assessments. This is often overlooked, but why do we have to review our risk assessments. The aim of the review is to keep the document valid, but also look to improve it, as your business or work activities change then so should your risk assessments.

In general terms, risk assessments should be reviewed at a set interval. Now for a low risk task or work environment, this could be annually, but sometimes, for more high risk work, it could be more regularly or even after every time the task is completed. Whatever the case may be, the general review must ensure the following: All hazards have been identified. All control measures are suitable. And the risk ratings are acceptable. The document then can be signed, dated, and it’s valid again for whatever period that may be.

But, is the only time we need to complete a review? No, a review of your risk assessment will be triggered by the following. Firstly, an accident and an incident. Now this is a biggie. Remember, this document demonstrates how you manage risk, so if you’ve ever had an accident, you want to know that the hazard that caused it was included in the assessment and what measures you introduced to control it was sufficient. If something wasn’t included, why wasn’t it? So it could highlight that changes need to be made to the risk assessment process as a whole.

The other occasion when a risk assessment needs to be reviewed, is if there’s been significant change. So, what can be classified as significant change? This could be changes to your work process, new equipments being used, employees completing the work have changed, or the workplace itself has changed. All these have the potential to introduce new hazards, thus requiring new risk ratings to be calculated and new controls to be introduced. The most important thing is that the review ensures that the risk assessment is moving in line with your business and it’s constantly improving.

Now there’s one thing that may be asked if your risk assessment, is it suitable and sufficient? But what does this mean? For your risk assessment to be deemed suitable and sufficient it must meet certain criteria and this can be a checklist to ensure you’ve covered all bases. So, to be suitable and sufficient, a risk assessment has to show that all persons who could be affected have been considered. Remember, this is not just your own employees, but take into account visitors, guests, other employees, members of the public.

All significant hazards have been identified. Remember, these are the foreseeable hazards. You’re not expected to identify unforeseeable ones. Control measures are suitable, in that they lower the risk rating to an acceptable level. Workers and their representatives have been consulted. Remember, you get some valuable information from these sources. And finally, the required level of competence has been put into the assessment. What do we mean by competence? Well, this means knowledge, experience and skill. You could already have this either yourself or within the workplace. But sometimes this is where it has to be outsourced and health and safety consultants such as myself might come in and complete a risk assessment or an industry expert.

And that ladies and gentlemen, in a nutshell, is what a risk assessment is. It plays a vital part in any health and safety management system and is the foundation for you to manage risk effectively in your business. So remember, keep the process simple. implement effective methods to gather comprehensive information that needs to be included. Document them in a way which is easy for employees to understand and implement. And have a schedule to review them and always look to improve them.

You’ve been listening to Safety Made Simple. Our podcast series helping make the world of health and safety easier to understand and easier to implement. If there’s a topic you’d like us to cover, then please get in touch using the hashtag Safety Made Simple or via our website, Praxis42.com.