Rank: New forum user 
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Hello fellow IOSH folk,
I'd be grateful for some opinions or guidance if anyone can provide it. The Company I work for is looking to change the format of our risk assessments and is putting forward a strong suggestion the we remove the 'further action necessary' section entirely. I am told the intention is to have a separate document - an action plan to replace it.
Personally, I have not seen a risk assessment without this section and am of the understanding that it is actually a fundamental part of a risk assessment ( I may well be wrong!) Can someone advise please?
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Rank: Super forum user 
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Smather
Assuming that you are in a legislative regime based on EC Directives, and in a Member State that "copied out" the requirements of e.g. the Framework Directive (without prescribing anything on top of its requirements), then there is no prescriptive method of documenting risk assessments. Could be qualitative, semi-quantitive, or quantified, or a mix and might or might not be supplemented by e.g. a method statement, or Standard Operating Procedure etc. If everyone in your organisation understands that every risk assessment should also have an Action Plan which for some assessments might indicate no actions necessary, then OK. But, if so, then by implication, when any action is closed out on the Action Plan(s) it will be time to revisit the risk assessment! Possibly someone is trying to make life more difficult for themselves without thinking through the practicalities.
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 1 user thanked peter gotch for this useful post.
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Rank: New forum user
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Thanks, peter gotch, for the clarification. I will try to use the "if its not broken, dont fix it" argument!
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Rank: Forum user 
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Our Risk Assessments have a seperate action plan at the back, which then link to an Action Plan Spreadsheet in Excel.
The cynic in me would say the reason to remove it from the risk assessment would be that quite often no on goes back and closes these actions out or if they do they don't update the form and come Audit time you get a Major Non-conformity for it.
The other issue is that the person writing the risk assessment often doesn't tell the person who needs to complete the actions.
So I can see the reason for taking it out and having it seperate. If you have 20 Risk Assessment and each one has actions, it can be hard to manage. Have all those actions in once place and it makes it easier to manager and review.
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Rank: Super forum user
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In my particular field it is not uncommon that the person conducting the risk assessment is competent to do this but does not have the knowledge to decide on the most appropriate control measures. Consider that these may include changes in the actual production/operating process, experience on organisational structure and possible changes, specialised knowledge on PPE (in my case particularly gloves for chemical protection) and health surveillance. Will they be able to define the actions needed?
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Rank: Super forum user
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Our risk assessments have the actions required on a separate page. These are then linked to a sheet that makes it a lot easier to prioritise the work and clearer what is needed. From this I can create a sheet for the engineers each week to work through, along with their routine maintenance schedule. It does make for a more cumbersome document, but with hyper links etc. it is not much of an issue. I found that when the actions needed were combined with the RA they tended to only get completed just before the next review, which isn't how I wanted it to happen.
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Rank: Super forum user 
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I can dangers / pitfalls of both approaches what I have seen work really well is having a separate spreadsheet of Corrective Actions and Preventative Action (CAPA) which is analogous with how customer complaints and defects are dealt with in Quality Assurance systems. I would leave something in the risk assessment to indicate that corrective actions have been identified otherwise you lose the link back to the reason for the actions.
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