Rank: Forum user 
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Hi all
generic risk assessments what are your thoughts? Do they work for you? Or do you think they take away the safety thought process?
cheers
Dave
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Rank: Super forum user 
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It depends on the nature and level of risk, they can be a useful starting place. They work for me in certain respects because I have a lot of sites all doing the same things.
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Rank: Super forum user 
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What do you mean by "generic"? Risk Assessment is essentially a management tool. A suitable and sufficient Risk Assessment for a task or activity should assess all foreseeable risks, and should answer the question "am I doing enough, or need I do more?
What is it you think this "generic" might not be addressing?
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Rank: Super forum user
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Safety Smurf wrote:It depends on the nature and level of risk, they can be a useful starting place. They work for me in certain respects because I have a lot of sites all doing the same things.
Same for me, we have generic to cover certain aspects that can be made site specific as all our depots have some different processes but lots that are the same.
We still have to access the risks on a depot to depot basis to ensure we never miss anything off.
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Rank: Super forum user 
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As the previous respondents have suggested, generic RAs fulfil a function, but their usefulness depends on a number of other factors. They can be used as an aid memoir for specific activities where there are few variables eg working with hand tools, ladders, young people etc. In truth, they tend to be more useful for ensuring compliance with legislation than they are from a h&s perspective.
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Rank: Super forum user 
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We have a good number of what we lovingly call GRA's (about 30), they are a fantastic tool for us, they are beneficial as they not only cover what are seen as regular day-to-day activities, but they can also be used to quickly and efficiently create new assessments that are specific to certain events.
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Rank: Super forum user 
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We have a proliferation of RAs and I want to reign them in. As stated above often the RAs will be duplicating work done in previous RAs. I am planning to work from our hazard register and do a generic RA for each topic with a final checklist for the hierarchy for mitigating each one. Once done this will allow staff to refer to the hazard register and only risk assess what is missing
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Rank: Super forum user 
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We use generic risk assessments for trades' activities, but they are complimented by method statements. It depends on the task and the advice we give is that where a task is deemed specialist, unusual or the risk is raised over that identified in the generics, then a specific assessment will be carried out. Usually these are for one-off projects, so we archive those once complete and keep as a resource for future use and/or amendment.
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Rank: Forum user
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I agree with other respondents on this thread. In general they are a good starting point - an aide memoire at best.
I'm not a fan of generic assessments as I think it is too easy to miss a hazard or fail to address some other factor which may be present. I would suggest that this is especially so if they are accepted "off the peg".
I'm of the same opinion of RayRapp; they maybe suited to compliance with legislation but of limited use in terms of health and safety.
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Rank: Forum user
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David1967 wrote:Hi all
generic risk assessments what are your thoughts? Do they work for you? Or do you think they take away the safety thought process?
cheers
Dave
Sorry, i forgot to add:
Yes. I think they can take away the safety thought process.
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