Afternoon I am looking for some help, advice, guidance if possible

Our tasks of machine repairs are risk assessed and up to date, how ever we rqeuire the engineers to complete a Dynamic Risk assessment before each task and record the findings of hazards and control measures prior to undertaking the task.

I understand that a Dynamic Assessment does not replace the task risk assessment but what is the legal position regarding Dynamic assessments  could we use them in defence or as a form of risk assessment? and would they be accepted by the HSE in relation to actually risk assessing the task.

The help and advice would be grateful

Using something as variable as the weather, a RA may refer to taking account of the weather, but  wouldn't the DRA deal with the actual conditions at the time.  An RA cannot take account of every eventuality likely to be encountered.  We might even say that a DRA is a constant activity through the task as it is (in theory) always checking that the risks are following the RA, and if they are not, do we continue or do we stop.

Duncan

What you call it matters little.

However, it appears that your organisation appears to recognise that not everything can be predicted in advance by someone sitting in an office, particularly for anyone in a roving role, and even more particularly, when that involves going to places that are not controlled by your organisation.

If we try and over-predict from the office in such situations any documentation would readily become completely unwieldy and not user-friendly for those at the sharp end.

So any good dynamic risk assessment effectively is based on assessing issues that come up time and again and leaving it to well trained people to be trusted to consider local variants. Gives them a degree of autonomy and less centralist control. Ultimately they are probably more likely to make the right decisions if they feel that they are part of the decision making process.

From the tame HSE inspectors I have dealt with, I have found that they dislike the dynamic risk assessment approach because it is seen as a cop out. An employee is injured on the job and inspector asked “where was the risk assessment” and the employer said “we use dynamic risk assessment and it is upto he employee to come up with a safe system of work for that particular job” On the other hand, some inspectors tend to assume that everybody works on a production line with constant supervision, and that every hazard and risk are obvious to the line management and that they should lead by creating the appropriate risk assessment. Sensible organisations, as mentioned create generic assessments based on the hazards and the risk known about by management.  But they empower staff to do their own local dynamic assessment to check that this generic assessment is appropriate and that it covers all local conditions and issues. It empowers people to decide how to apply certain controls (within limits) and what additional controls they need to apply. They also allow staff to say “this is out of my comfort zone- I’ll come back later”. There has to be a feedback loop and the local risk assessment should feedback into generic assessments as more information about the real working conditions emerges (a sort of continuous review). The risk assessments that should emerge from this process should be “fully suitable and sufficient” and so fully comply with legal requirements.