Lessons in safety - April 23

THERE ARE hundreds of articles and guides on how to do a risk assessment. At its basic level, this should be a straightforward task – there are even free templates on the Health & Safety Executive website to help anyone get started, where you can fine at https://tinyurl.com/2p8nrbzw. There are other templates and helpful risk assessment tools for things like manual handling too. 

But what makes a great risk assessment? It’s not the process or the piece of paper – it’s the output, learning, actions and enabling of workers. This sounds pretty obvious but it’s all too easy to get drawn into documenting Every. Single. Thing. Only bother your workers with things that are relevant – everyone is time poor so equip them with the tools, training and knowledge they need.

What helps keep risk assessments relevant? Only include things that are foreseeable. If you start including non-significant or highly unlikely risks then you’ll end up with pages and pages of irrelevant content that people are unlikely to read. But what if something happens that’s not on my risk assessment? Enter ‘dynamic risk assessments’…

Dynamic risk assessment is the process of assessing risk in a changing environment or when something unexpected occurs. They do not replace the need for an initial risk assessment, they should complement what is already there.

But what makes dynamic risk assessments different is that 1) they very rarely involve a HSE professional at the time they are used and 2) they are usually not documented until afterwards. 

You see, in order for workers to do a dynamic risk assessment, the HSE professional must lay the groundwork. Your general risk assessments will have equipped workers with a ‘toolkit’ of how to approach situations and be able to apply these tools to/make decisions about unexpected situations. One critical piece of learning they should be equipped with is the knowledge and confidence to stop the work while they make an assessment of the situation and how to proceed. 

To illustrate where dynamic risk assessments would be used effectively, consider when emergency service workers attend the scene of an incident. Any dynamic risk assessment undertaken in this scenario will be a variation of controls that have already been identified and drilled into the emergency workers’ response. In having the discipline to consciously observe and assess the risks and hazards present, assured and informed decisions can be made to control the risks that are presented and/or evolve, but the decision-making process will be based on controls already identified.

Following the use of a dynamic risk assessment, that risk has become reasonably foreseeable and therefore should go into the general risk assessments. Here HSE professionals are responsible for reviewing what has happened – what can be learnt? What goes in the general risk assessment? Does it influence other work/programmes/training? 

It’s just not possible to foresee every possible eventuality or to be there when the unexpected does occur. But as HSE professionals we can equip our workers with everything they need to be able to risk assess new situations and have processes in place to review and learn from them afterwards. 

NEBOSH worked with the Health and Safety Executive to develop an introductory qualification that provides straightforward, practical health and safety risk management skills; the NEBOSH HSE Award in Managing Risks and Risk Assessment at Work. 

Matt Powell-Howard is head of product development at NEBOSH. For more information, visit www.nebosh.org.uk/hserisk