God they are boring and always get left till last! (DSE Assessments come a close second)

That is all

Thank You

Worse stil is persuading them to read the ruddy assessment in the first place and then apply the precautions stipulated.

Badger

And, what's that thing where you say "COSHH Assessment" and they hear "Safety Data Sheet" and you say "no, that's not an assessment" and they say "yes, it is. It's got all the safety information on" and then....

Just saying.

You're assessing a task, process or activity that happens to involve use or exposure to a substance hazardous to health. If you find that boring, that doesn't bode well for general Reg 3 MHSWR assessments.
DSE = predominantly self-assessment by the User, not the in-house H&S bod, who need only concern himself with any 'filtered' significant findings.

In my experience with chemicals (with particular reference to skin exposure) it isn't the ones that are really hazardous that account for most of the skin problems I am often asked to investigate. It's the ones that have not been classified as hazardous, i.e. have no risk phrase allocated to them and thus do not appear on the safety data sheet, that cause most workplace skin problems - and there are thousands of these. (There are several very common skin sensitisers (ones that dermatologists stock in their refrigerator as they need them so often for patch testing) that have never been assigned R43 and thus won't be on your safety data sheet.)

Since these substances are not classified as hazardous and are not on the safety data sheet, they are all too often ignored, with subsequent unpleasant consequence.

Actually - forget the safety data sheet. Instead take a look again at section 6-1 of the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974. If suppliers would comply with their duties under this section life would be much simpler!

Chris

Me I like DSE.
It’s an opportunity to get out of the office and directly help people in a positive way rather than finding yourself in the position of explaining to them why they shouldn’t be doing something. And as for COSHH well then... we quite a bit of it here including biological agents (I’m a microbiologist by trade). What causes most lost time incidents, that’ll be the manual handling?
What are the really exiting bits of H&S looking at machines that go round and round and chop things up, scaffolding ( why can’t I just roll this scaffold tower along while the guy on top paints the ceiling?) ? Or perhaps you are a systems person who spends all of their time drawing up action plans and flow diagrams of processes: risk assessment leads to safe system of work leads to compliance. Who enjoys doing the statistics and likes creating pie charts showing the number of accidents described by severity of injury.
There is always that really detailed piece of guidance that has just come out from the latest HSE programme: what does it mean and do you care?
Finally that ultimate H&S job: standing there wearing your hi-vis vest, hard hat etc with clipboard staring into a hole.
It’s the variety of things that H&S does that make it so fun.

Wow bet some of you guys are a right barrel of laughs at the annual Christmas Party!

To me COSHH Assessments are boring, I did not say they weren't important or taken seriously and considering ours are 6 pages long I think they evaluate the Hazards, controls etc pretty well enough rather then just copying from the MSDS which most people do (as mentioned above). Then considering I then run COSHH Tool Box talks for the guys that use the substances covering the hazards and what they need to do, I think I take it seriously.

And as for DSE Assessments being self-assessments by the user to me is a complete cop out and not worth the paper they are written on as 95% people think they need a foot rest!!! How would you prove their competence to undertake a self assessment? Seems to me people consider it not important enough to do themselves....

But if it would appease people, I apologise for stating that I found some aspects of my Job boring and as COSHH is very low risk in the place a work and very minimal how dare I put it near the bottom of my Work Plan, yes shocking I know!

No wonder you find it boring, if you do six page assessments and COSHH tool box talks for a very low risk issue in your workplace.

I can't stop saying 'flibble'.

Still, brightens up a dull day working on noise assessments (doh!)