Posted By Nick Higginson It never ceases to amaze me how many people come on here asking for other peoples risk assessments. Surely the whole point in Risk Assessment was self-regulation, i.e. to make individual companies responsible for their own health and safety? How can this be done by cribbing someone elses RA? Is it the case that people are being caught in the trap of trying to produce a near perfect risk assessment, but doing nothing with the results. It doesn't really matter how you do your risk assessment, as there is no prescriptive format. Indeed all regulation 3 of the Management Regs says is that RA's must be "suitable and sufficient". It does not say that you must have a complicated scoring system including Accident Probability x Severity x Frequency x No. of people = 1033556 Hazard Rating Number etc. I agree that something more complicated is needed for high risk situations, but not some of the requests on this message board - offices, manual handling, young people etc. SO grab a copy of 5 steps to risk assessment and as many free HSE leaflets as you can get and have a go! As long as you identify all the hazards, and actually DO something about them, who cares what your form looks like? Any thoughts/comments anyone?

Posted By Nick Higginson Graham, Thanks for the comments,I maybe able to help with NEBOSH Cert, send me your address and I'll send what I can (unfortunately it's only hard copy) although I may have some electronic stuff. Regards, Nick

Posted By Richard Nick I think you're being a bit hard on the majority of the users of the forum. If someone has already spent a couple of days studying the risks associated with working with flim flam valves why not get the benefit of their knowledge and experience? Even if your flim flam valve operates in a different environment, you may gain some basic knowledge, and save yourself a bit of time. Having said that, I must admit that some of the requests are a bit over the top! Richards

Posted By Nick Higginson Guys, I think you are being a bit reactonary here. The comments I am making are to encourage newcomers, not put them off - "If you give a man a fish he will be fed today, whereas if you teach a man to fish he will feed himself for the rest of his life". Can you see any relevance here? Simply handing over a bank of generic maintenance assessments is not going to help people carry out RA's in future - they will simply come onto the forum and ask again. If they have a go (and by all means come onto the forum and ask advice on HOW to carry out an RA) and make a good job, they will no doubt be bitten by the bug and keep going themselves. Although I profess i am no expert, if any newcomers want any advice on carrying out RA's, feel free to contact me on nickhigginson@hotmail.com and I'll do whatever I can, or at least point you in the right direction. Please don't feel that I was criticizing anyone, it wasn't my intention. And at 24, I am hardly a seasoned health and safety proffessional myself, so please don't be put off or offended by my comments. Sometimes it is nice to get a fresh perspective.

Posted By Peter J Harvey Nick, May I also say that your views came across as very refreshing and underpinned a point that I tend to spend all of my time trying to get through to people. The basic risk assessment is basic, simple easy to use and I mean use, it should form part of every day business activity and the more basic and simple it is the more likely it is to be understood and used by a workforce. Crib the hard stuff by all means, but use a simple and easy to follow method otherwise, the more complicated you get the more dust the risk assessment will gather. Peter Harvey