Hello, Traditionally as a company we have risk assement guides and gain signatures from all employees to say they have read an understood them. Now for one of our parts of the business I have a guide specific to them but its got 100 risk assesments in . Do I really need to get all staff to go through this full guide and sign? During personal injury claims the solicitors ask for proof theyve seen the risk assesment. Im just concerned as its information overload for the staff. what do you think?

Surely the job is to share the findings of those risk assessments with those affected. This is done in all sorts of ways: general H&S training, job-specific training, posters, procedures...... It is worth them knowing that all this information has been arrived at from the risk assessment process. I'd shoot myself if I was expected to read all those things. Similar approach sometimes applied to policies. Those on the shopfloor don't need to be familiar with policies, they just need to know how the policy has been applied in their bit of the organisation.

During personal injury claims the solicitors ask for proof theyve seen the risk assesment. At the risk of being bold I would ask why are we being driven by solicitors? Risk Assessments need only be made available to employees. Going down the route of getting them to sign a document to say they have read it is nothing more than 'paper safety'. A piece of paper never saved anyone. As the previous poster has mentioned, it is the end product arising from the RAs which is important - not the recipe.

Risk assessments are a management tool to identify what risks are present and how high that risk is, so why insist that every employee reads and understands them? I have known senior managers who are unable to understand even simple risk assessments, but that is another issue. The most important thing is that they understand the controls that must be applied to reduce the risk actually happening. Many people who undertake the work in question can suffer from information overload and miss the important part of actually implementing the control measures.

Lisareed - what do you mean by a risk assessment 'guide'? We have a guidance doc that we issue to front line teams that helps make sense of applying risk principles (5x5 semi quantitative stuff). But we don't share assessments with staff (other than legal obligations to H&S reps) less still get them to sign for them. As others have said, it's not the numbers and factors that are directly important to front line - it's the resulting safe system.