A well thought-out and implemented risk assessment can be a major step in ensuring that your business does not cause harm to people. Put simply, the aim of a risk assessment is to make sure that no-one gets hurt or becomes ill as a result of work activities.
A risk assessment is simply a step-by-step examination of what happens in your business allowing you to identify potential hazards and to put in place control measures to protect people.
As its name implies, a risk assessment can involve a balancing act, weighing up potential hazards against the likelihood, or risk, of that hazard actually harming someone. The important thing you need to decide is whether a hazard is significant and whether you have taken satisfactory precautions so that the risk is small.
Risk Assessment Steps: -
The requirement to carry out a risk assessment applies to:-
- all employers; and
- all self-employed persons.
In general, the law requires that you must:-
- make an assessment of the risks that employees are exposed to when at work
- make an assessment of the risks to the health and safety of people not in your employment
- where the employer has five or more employees, records of the significant findings of the assessment must be made.
In general, the law requires that you must:-
- make an assessment of his own risks to health and safety
- make an assessment of the risks to health and safety to other people arising out of your work
A risk assessment should follow five simple steps:
Step 1 - Look for the hazards. If you are doing the assessment yourself, walk around your workplace and look at what could reasonably be expected to cause harm. Ignore trivial points and concentrate on what could result in serious harm or affect several people or more. Try to look at your business with a fresh pair of eyes.
Step 2 - Decide who might be harmed and how. Remember that some people may be at greater risk, for example trainees, new members of staff, contractors, young people, expectant mothers or employees with existing medical conditions. Also do not forget to include cleaners, visitors, maintenance people, members of the public especially children, and shift workers.
Step 3 - Evaluate the risks and decide whether existing precautions are adequate or whether more needs to be done. Consider how likely it is that each hazard could cause harm. Even after all precautions have been taken, some risk usually remains. What you have to do is to decide for each significant hazard is whether this remaining risk is high, medium or low. First, ask yourself:
- Have you done everything you are legally required to do? For example, there are legal requirements on prevention of access to dangerous parts of machinery.
- Have you applied generally accepted industry standards?
The aim is to make all risks small. If you find something that requires action, ask yourself:
- Can I get rid of the hazard altogether?
- If not, how can I control the risk so that harm is unlikely?
Use the following hierarchy to reduce risk:
- Try a less risky option
- Prevent access to the hazard
- Organise the work activity to reduce exposure to the hazard
- Issue Personal Protective Equipment (PPE)
- Provide washing facilities for the removal of contamination and first aid
Step 4 - Record your findings. If you have five or more employees, you must record the significant findings of your risk assessment. This means writing down the significant hazards you have identified and what action you have taken to reduce the risk. There is a legal requirement to make sure that your risk assessment is suitable and sufficient. You will need to show that:
- Proper checks were made
- You identified who might be harmed, and how
- You dealt with all the obvious or significant hazards
- The action you took was reasonable and reduced the risk
Step 5 - Review your assessment. A risk assessment should be a working document that is reviewed regularly to ensure that it is still effective. You should consider reviewing your assessment, for example, when your main business activity changes, if you move premises or when you purchase new pieces of equipment. If, when reviewing your assessment, you identify new hazards then your assessment may need to be revised to control these new hazards.
Some of the areas you might want to consider (it is not an exhaustive list - you will need to look around your business to identify other areas):-
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