Hello I'm new to Health & Safety and I am currently reviewing our risk assessment management plan. A risk assessment review date has been set for 18 months time. Our H&S monitoring programme is on-going and involves Housekeeping inspection checks, safety inspection tours etc, my question is would it be typical to perform a Risk Assessment Evaluation prior to the Risk Assessment Review even though no new processes or procedures have been introduced? Appreciate your help on this.

You can decide which approach you think best manages your risk assessment process in relation to the risks your company/employees face. If things are changing the reviews tend to be 'day to day', or as is relevant to the changes/risks, whereas if nothing changes the review should be quite simple. It's rather like if a new process is installed we would carry out a risk assessment at the time rather than wait 18 months and then decide we needed to risk assess the new process. Regards

Hi Anne13, I'm finding your use of terms a bit confusing. Not sure what different there is between an "evaluation" and a "review". It sounds like you are performing an interim health and safety audit on your management system?

I may be wrong... but I would view one as looking at how you actually carry out your risk assessment processes; (qualitative/quantitative/generic/individual/ template/ standard review frequency/ training of assessors/verification process for assessors...... etc and the other is having a look at the actual assessments that have actually been done under this regime and revising content. Obviously if you review the process then the individual assessments will be revised in accordance with the new process/template/training scheme - but this does not mean all current RA's are automatically invalid until they reach their sell by date.

Another way of looking at it might be - Evaluating your current range of assessments to satisfy yourself that all areas are covered adequately eg do you have COSHH assessments for all processes that use chemicals, have all major pieces of equipment been assessed from that point of view of PUWER, do you have manual handling assessments for all manual handling tasks, have you considered vulnerable groups such as pregnant women, young people, visitors, do you consider maintenence activities etc, are all these things cross referenced to each other, and do your assesments take into account human factors such as motivation (or lack of), competence, attitude etc. A review would be are your individual assessments still relevant to the process actually taking place. So, in short, have you got every thing covered and are they covered adequately?