Hi All,

As part of my ongoing quest to change the way we currently do Health & Safety by looking our processes and formats. I'm looking at the good old Risk Assessment document.

We have the standard: hazard, who’s at risk, controls in place, risk rating, any other controls required and they are equipment or activity based. All very standard and pretty much the same format most people use to some degree.

So I want to get more of a flow to the process which might engage people more and help when completing them. I often work backwards and do the SSOW first as this tends to identify the hazards and controls more organically. My thought then went to, why not do this in the risk assessment (stay with me here) and I have come up with template that goes along these lines:

Step, Process, who will be at risk, what hazards will they be exposed to, what controls are in place.

The plan is that for the risk assessment you are assessing each step of the process and identifying the hazards and controls for that step. So rather than identifying Manual Handling as a hazard for the whole assessment, you might only identify it for step 1 and 6 of the process and the controls for each part might be different as dictated by the activity for that step.

It’s a work in progress and the end goal is to help Managers identify hazards and controls easier when doing risk assessments.

Thoughts, feelings, why am I making life harder for myself etc

Seems quite similar to a fault tree analysis in the approach

SBH

Sounds like "Job Safety Analysis" to me.  And yes it can be a useful approach.

Originally Posted by: Kate

Sounds like "Job Safety Analysis" to me.  And yes it can be a useful approach.

Sounds like Job Safety Analysis to me too - goes to show there is nothing new.....  but it is an approach that has largely been overlooked in favour of the approach described by the HSE which to my mind lacks imagination and doesn't give people the essential cues to think about what could go wrong, why it could go wrong and what will happen if it goes wrong!

Does anyone else do a Workplace Risk Assessment (For the building) and a Task Based Risk Assessment (for the job) we do this at my place of work and my previous employer and have found it along with the workforce that it worls very well.

Following Acorn's post, I think the problem is that RAs have sometimes been a substitute for proper training and to a lesser extent, supervision. Writing something on a piece of paper is not getting the job done safely. A method statement, or job analysis, whatever you want to call it is fine for explaining how the job should be done safely. Adding a list of RAs to the SSoW and a matrix is frankly a complete waste of time, effort and paper.

To be honest, I've always done my risk assessments by area and function rather than hazard.  In an area I will list the processes in detail, the hazards, the competence of employees, the control measures and any action required to make processes safer.  The assessment runs the full gamut of risks and hazards present in that area.  I thought everyone did it like this ...