General Risk Assessment

Risk assessments are a fundamental tool to compliant risk management.  They provide a step by step approach to identifying hazards within working activities or processes and analysing the level of risk they present enabling effective controls to be set in place that comply to the legislative guidance hierarchy. 

Without a risk assessment companies can find themselves guessing and either spending too much time and resource on the lesser risks and missing the significant ones. 

The HSE says:

As part of managing the health and safety of your business you must control the risks in your workplace. To do this you need to think about what might cause harm to people and decide whether you are taking reasonable steps to prevent that harm. This is known as risk assessment and it is something you are required by law to carry out. If you have 5 or more employees, this must be in writing.

A risk assessment is not about creating huge amounts of paperwork, but rather about identifying sensible measures to control the risks in your workplace. You are probably already taking steps to protect your employees, but your risk assessment will help you decide whether you have covered all you need to. 

The 5 steps to carrying out a risk assessment are as follows: 

• Identify the risks – this means have a look, talk to the workers to understand what ‘could happen’. 
• Who could be harmed and how – How can those identified risks cause the harm, and who to? Ensure you consider visitors, contractors.
  
• Evaluate the risks and decide on the precautions – is the risk of harm likely to happen, or unlikely? How can you avoid or reduce the risk of harm happening?
• Record your significant findings – Make sure you write down what you have found, this is good to use to communicate and to measure after improvement, changes to equipment or processes.
• Review your assessment and update if necessary – this means review the assessment where there is change further to equipment changes, process or environmental changes, after an incident and on a regular basis, to ensure the assessment remains up to date. 

If you need help with this, just make contact and we can give you the help you need!