Can anyone give some tips on how they avoid repetition in their risk assessments.  A client has lots of different work activities which involve the use of overhead cranes.  Some of these activities are of a relatively low risk activity (are well controlled) and some are a little more complex and higher risk.  However there are at least 15 - 20 work activites which could involve the use of the OH cranes. 

Would your expectations be that there would be 15 - 20 task risk assessments each with the lifting operation hazards and controls in them

or 

reference made to a risk assessment for using overhead cranes which contains the detail of both the low and higher risk activities and their respective control measures.

I cannot see the benefit of repeating the same thing over multiple risk assessments when it can be documented in one.

There are lots of other activities too which for example involve the use of cordless grinders,  doe anyone have thoughts on this too.  Again, to have the hazard and controls for using a grinder repeated over at least half a dozen risk assessments is not a good use of the assessors time.

Anyone have any thoughts, experience or suggestions for this as for the people undertaking the assessments, the feedback I get is that it is a trawl and makes each document overly long and complicated.

thanks in advance.

I totally agree on the communication method,  I believe it was driven more by insurers asking if employees had signed risk assessments and SSOW for tasks.  The belief was that there should be a risk assessment for each and every work operation of which there are many!

I would rather look at the department as a whole and assess the risks in that department which could be

Use of OH cranes - this would incorporate all forseeable use of the crane and general principles of safe slinging, crane operation, inspection and maintenance of equipment ant accessories, training etc

Use of grinders - covering all known uses of the grinders within that department

Pouring concrete  (5 different activities/ products to be made but basically using the same method of pouring)

and so on and so forth for other hazards such as noise, use of hand tools etc.

I think sometimes it is easy to get bogged down in the detail and overthink/over complicate.

In my organisation we had a similar situation. For example in the woodworking shop we had a RA for each machine but as the hazards were virtually the same for each one we opted to merge them into one RA that covered all fixed woodworking machinery.