Posted By Ian Stone As a College we have lots of offsite trips/activities run each year (about 600+), with things from visiting a local shop to walking holidays and everything in between, with age range of 14-85. We get the staff to fill out notification forms and risk assess the activity. This is then checked and double checked by relevant people (eg mountain rescue groups or pot holing association!) The problem we have is that staff are worried about their liability on these trips, following info from their unions, and also some of the assessments we get in are poor despite training they have undertaken. We have been investigating the use of a CD ROM package that the local council provides to all of its schools that has a database of about 1500 different activities with generic hazards and controls that would be expected for that activity. It allows you to search an activity and accept the hazards and controls on the CD and modify/add to them so its individual to that activity, it then saves this new assessment. Has anyone else come across anything similar that we could look at? Many thanks Ian

Posted By Ian Stone Thanks for the response The event organiser works through the CD assessments, for example: they are rock climbing, they would click on the relevant subject and a list of hazards would appear that would normally be associated with that activity they then click to accept these hazards, then controls that would be expected for that hazard comes up, if they decide that the control is no good or wrong they can change it but will be aksed several times if they are sure they want to change it. The process then follows through and comes up with a risk assessment for that activity. The system seems to be good. Ian