Just need to have a moan..

H + S Consultants, who know lots of regs and rules but know nothing about the actual industry they are advising!
Risk assessments , to be suitable and sufficient, should be carried out by someone with the knowledge, training AND EXPERIENCE. Am I right or wrong?

Where do 'consultants' get the belief that, because they have lots of letters after their name, but NO practical experience of operations, they can advise businesses that OUR Risk assessments, method statements, practices are unsuitable?
WE do this EVERY day , WE have the experience and knowledge of what is safe and what is not, but some suited 'consultant' who wouldn't know what end of a hammer to hold scribbles all over my RAMS making sweeping statements that are nonsense and impractical in the REAL world.!!

Come on you Independent Safety Consultants.... defend yourselves!!
AAARRGGHH!!!

Oh what a suprise, another Consultant bashing post.

I suspect that it is not a consultant employed by roshqse's Company, but a customer where they have submitted the information for a job, who have employed a consultant to vet it.

Yes you are 'consultant bashing'. Becuase you are not slating this particular consultant but 'consultants' in the plural.

Have a go at someone who can't do their job by all means but not all consultants. Many us are getting really cheesed off with the attitude that just becuase their are some bad consultants that must mean we are all bad.

You asked us consultants to defend ourselves. Well I won't because I haven't done anything wrong.

Not forgetting that sometimes as a Consultant you are acting on instructions from the Client and abiding by the Clients existing procedures.

p.s. previous place I have worked used to have a lock off system for valves, I belive Arco sell them :P

So what does being on the OSHCR proove?

From the other thread that is running about OSCHR - probably very little

rohqse

So how do you prove the isolation of an oil valve?:-)

I think you are criticising somebody because s/he is asking questions you may not have fully considered. Remember Bhopal it was assumed that something was off and isolated but it could not be proved that isolation was complete.

Bob

As someone who is neither a consultant nor do I hire any, can I ask a 'naive' question? Who's backside gets covered first - the consultant's or the client's?

In a recent talk, The President of IOSH identified the tendency of risk assessments to be continually added to, and hence keep growing until they become unmanagable. He also highlighted the need to talk to those who really know the job - those that work there.

Hopefully the majority of consultants are good and 'keep it real' by talking to those that know.

roshqse, your consultant-bashing posting suggests that consultants think they are the ones to WRITE risk assessments.

I suggest a good consultant (like myself :o) doesn't solely write RAs. It's a team effort involving designers, engineers, operators or whoever knows a job/industry. In a new task/activity I talk with them and guide them through identifying hazards etc the 5 or 7 step process.

I like to think I 'compile' risk assessments and ensure they are suitable and sufficient (that is what is required, isn't it?).

After all the consultation effort it's always left to me to compile or 'write-up' the written risk assessments and later on conduct the reviews. 'Write-up' is different from 'write'.

I've never driven an FLT, never welded, never erected a scaffold, but I have worked with drivers, fitters and scaffolders, and compiled risk assessments for those activities!

This is exactly what I mean about not knowing the work involved.
The valve in question (one of 10 in fact) is an isolation valve to remove a piece of equipment. The valve is IMMEDIATELY next to where the joint is broken.
There is NO way of checking the valve is sealing properly (some of these valves have NEVER been closed in 20 to 30 years, honestly) until you physically open the joint and see if oil comes out.
Hence why the standard procedure, industry wide, is to use drip mats, rags, buckets etc. under the joint when it opens.

So again, we come back to the consultant NOT understanding the process, NOT understanding the industry, NOT understanding the plant in question. But feeling free to criticise our working practices without any consultation with ourselves or the client.
Oh and feeling free to charge the client lots of money for work they obviously don't understand.

"The President of IOSH identified the tendency of risk assessments to be continually added to, and hence keep growing until they become unmanageable..."
Which is what has happened here. My RA went from 4 pages of relevant, significant hazard identification and controls, to 15 pages! Covering things like how to protect the public from dust getting on their cars!
And this is on a secure site with no public access!

I fully agree that HSE guidance, ACOP's, Regs etc are there for a reason.
However, they don't all fit every situation.

There are some good consultants, I've used a couple myself for more specific technical issues, and some who do ask for advice, clarification, offer suggested alterations to documents. I just wish more would...

Sorry Zyggy didn’t mean to upset you in my post 5 noted in your post 14. I merely thought that the previous posters had misunderstood that the consultant was one employed by his customer not his company. I had not offered an opinion either way.

I also originally thought that roshque had not tarred all consultants, but just those that in his opinion had shown him up to his customer without discussing the issue with the people that do the work first (Which is his company). I think that posters following me seem to agree when risk assessing anything, you talk to the people that do the work, which seems as if this consultant didn’t. As they say it is good to talk. I can see why others think he was having a go at all consultants though.

I’m slightly curious about the scenario now, this pipe with oil, is the oil normally under pressure and so may retain stored energy? Or if the pipe was say broken would the oil just pour out onto the floor, opposed to spraying everywhere?.

Agree in principal but disagree too - (slightly on the fence, but I've done my working at height risk assessment)

If a Consultant with loads of letters after their name wanders into a business and 'does' a risk assessment completely solo, then yes, I agree with the critisism, but the majority of Consultants worth their salt, would involve the people actually doing the job/task. To NOT do so would be stupid. (I do know it goes on....)

To me, another issue with Consultants 'doing' risk assessments and then signing them off, if the fact that once a consultant leaves the premises, they have absolutely NO control over any control measures put in place - dangerous!

Totally agree with your sensible response. You used the word 'reality' and IMO should always be accounted for. As to a far happier forum I am not sure. There are many posts with added humour but the 'reality' is H&S is serious business and sometimes those that are passionate about their work get fired up. As for consultants, I have never used any but if I ever had to would ensure I did my homework on them. I have had some very good feedback from others who have needed some assistance / work to be done by a consultant so they are not all bad and certainly it is wrong to tar them all with the same brush.

roshqse

Depends what the consultant is putting themselves up to do.

Sometimes there are real benefits in the consultant having little or no experience of the sector. Then approach the task without tunnel vision arising from custom and practice. A competent health and safety professional should be able to turn their skills to any sector (but obviously needs to know their limitations and get up a learning curve).

Exactly the same principles as traditionally applied by HSE who move their inspectors to new sectors every 5 years or so (and when I joined it was a matter of policy not to let a new inspector look at the sector they had come out from for several years - by that time should be able to objectively question the custom and practice they had accepted in the past).

Sadly the HSE haven't trained their inspectors up in industry sectors for years now. They went to multi-groups. Their philosophy is that you don't need to understand the industry to inspect the key risks of falls from height, workplace transport ecct etc. Construction has been the only exception. The many troubles with that approach lead to examples such as the one I was told about where a non-agricultural inspector went to a farm and told them to paint a walkway across their farmyard for the public right of way. Doh!!

I completely disagree with the philosophy that you don't need knowledge of the industry to advise / inspect it. However, I do also understand the idea that over familiarisation with any industry can make you accepting of / blind to the risks. For me we should strive to strike a balance bewteen the two.

It has no stored pressure. If the valve does leak , which they don't very often but is possible, it is minimal.
Over 2 or 3 hours, which is all the valve would be exposed for, you would be lucky to gather maybe 2 to 3 litres of oil. A non hazardous oil at that!
Oil drip mats and a bucket are more than sufficient.

And before anyone mentions the environmental risk , the oil goes back in the plant, and all the work takes place in a bund.

Please don't get me wrong here, I fully understand that if the valve was remote from the works on a pipe, under pressure, contained hazardous oils or chemicals, then yes I would be looking for a method of confirming the operation also.
But it's not.

And the over familiarisation is a problem too I agree. The only 2 minor incidents we have had in the last 12 months, have been caused, fundamentally, by the fact that the engineers DO get complacent.
It is something I am always banging on about.

Isn't always teh same? The difficult and unusual goes fine, the day to day is where it can go wrong?

I disagree. You need to understand the issues, or ask if you don't, and then choose a Consultant who will deliver what your business NEEDS.

Wants and Needs are two often diametrically different things. Get it wrong, you waste time and money; get it very wrong and you together with your business are in serious trouble.

On reflection( do I get a CPD point for that?), it is not just consultants, it is auditors both corporate and ISO and even often HSE. But also we have to deal with those at work who take the view that these safety regulations do not apply to them. What makes our job interesting, I would suggest is that we have to reconcile both sides. We have to translate regulations for our context into meaningful practises.

I think there's a general point about competency here, and it's not just consultants (by the way, I employ and ex-consultant in my team and he's first rate, the rest of the team call him prof). You probably all know that there have been prosecutions of safety people for giving advice outside their competency, Franky & Benny's wasn't it? And the bloke doing the RAs for the lathe he'd never seen before? Yes, I do sort of agree with Merv, I know people, processes, organisations and how to manage and so on, but what Clare says is so true; if it's beyond you walk away.

Dust on people's cars? Really?

John

As a aside, personally I'm always suspicious of any post where it is claimed that the HSE 'shut them down'. The HSE does not have that power. The HSE can prohibit a certain activity or piece of plant etc which is felt to be of immediate risk to safety but with what justification could they shut a whole business down. There is no imminent risk to safety from an entire business. The closest they could come to that would be to prohibit the use of an electrical system for example, which would by default mean the business couldn't operate. But that would require a speicalist to back up that such drastic action was required.