Posted By J Knight Hi Melanie, My feeling would be to include people exposed to the hazard for a short time if this exposure is likely to lead to injury. In situations where unforeseen circumstances lead to a brief exposure to a hazard, particularly in emergencies, you might get away with not including people briefly exposed. The situation you describe though sounds like a reasonably regular occurrence, and involves people working directly in a hazard area carrrying out hazardous tasks. If a grounds worker occasionally has to cut down a tree, they will be issued with PPE for this, even if their normal job is sweeping up leaves. Chopping down a tree doesn't take long, but the length of time is not taken into account in the PPE RA process. I would issue safety footwear, on the same principle that hard hats are hung up next to hard hat areas; you have a safety footwear area, and people working in it (as opposed to using a marked safe access route) should have safety footwear, John

Posted By fats van den raad Melanie If someone sustains a foot injury as a result from an accident at work you would be liable regardless of the time they spent in the department. Even if a person walking through the department using the safe walkways somehow suffers a foot injury as result of an accident, you would still be liable. I have same problem and the way I adressed it is as like this. Office personnel have sometimes (irregular, +/- once per day) the need to enter the warehouse. They are there for approx 10 minutes and all they do is check stock on the shelf against a query sheet. They use safe walkways and do not carry out any picking or other manual handling task. I assessed the risk of foot injury to these persons as low, and have added extra training about avoiding picking trolleys etc. when they are in there, Risk/cost balance I feel comfortable with the control measures in place for them not to wear safety shoes when in the warehouse. However, when I have people working in the warehouse, even if it is only for a short time I bite the bullet and issue them with safety shoes. Of course we then try to have the same people "help out" every time to minimise the cost. You really have to look at it as a balance between cost and the risk. Unfortunately because safety shoes are relatively cheap, I'm afraid it's really only the people that walk in and out in a matter of minutes that justifies not wearing safety shoes. Hope this helps Fats

Posted By Peter Batty Melanie I don't do a lot of quantative risk assessment though in this circumstance, I would have though that the likelihood would also include an element of time spent in the area, therefore multiplying by the number of hours would weight the risk unfairly ? So if the likelihood of an injury is one in every 50 activities (rather than one every 50 hours) then the time spent in the area is not a factor, it just depends who is unlucky enough to be carrying out the 50th activity. This also means that if a person is asked to help out during a busy period, the number of “activities” in the time period would surely be higher…. This would seem to confirm that protection should be supplied. Don’t you just love statistics!! Peter

Posted By George Melanie, are your Management in agreement for what you are trying to achieve? How many parties were involved in the risk assessment? If the findings of the risk assessment showed the need for safety footwear then I would agree with you that it should not matter how long a person spends in the dept. George Boyd

Posted By Steve Cartwright Hi Melanie I use a similar system for calculating the level of risk. Likelihood times severity. I use historical data to calculate the likelihood i.e. no record of incidents = 1 up to weekly/daily occurance = 6. If you have no record of any reported incidents and can still justify the cost of issuing safety shoes even though you have designated walkways go ahead and buy the shoes. You don't say what type of vehicles you have. If you have FLT the drivers should be trained to give pedestrians right of way. If a pedestrian does get hit with a FLT I think they will need a bit more than safety shoes. Steve

Posted By Melanie Black Thank You to everybody who has taken the time to reply. There are a wide variety of trolleys, roll cages, pump trucks, FLT's and such like in use in the department in question. We have segregated FLT routes etc, but as I'm sure you can imagine, it is more difficult to protect employees' feet from trolleys that they are wheeling up and down all day long. There are 20 full time employees in the department, with an extra half a dozen or so brought in to assist at busy periods or to cover absences. Senior Management wanted me to 're-do' the assessment taking into account exposure times - despite the fact I raised many of the points you have all put across. Perhaps if they see in print that the opinions of other safety professionals are pretty much the same as mine I will not be forced to re-do the assessment. Do you ever feel like jumping up and down and pointing to the certificates hanging on your wall that say you have a pretty good idea of how to carry out a risk assessment?!!!! No, me neither, I'm far more professional than that too!! Many thanks once again.

Posted By Neil Pearson I really don't find quantitative assessments helpful for this kind of risk. The numbers you feed into the equation are subjective anyway, so it's just as subjective as a qualitative assessment. But I agree with Peter above - the time of exposure to the risk affects the "likelihood" figure. Less time exposed to the risk, less likelihood of the harm occurring. So it's not severity x likelihood x time. It's still just severity x likelihood.