Risk Assessments – Why You Need Them and How to Do Them

A risk assessment is a careful examination of what in the workplace could cause harm to people, in order to assess whether enough precautions have been taken. The aim is to make sure that no one is subject to injury or infection. Accidents and ill health can ruin lives and affect business if output is lost, machinery is damaged, insurance costs increase, or if they result in litigation.

Under Management of Health & Safety at Work Regulations there is a requirement for every employer to make a suitable and sufficient risk assessment. It is also a requirement of several other regulations (COSHH, PUWER, LOLER, etc.) for specialist individual risk assessments to be carried out.

So how to do it? The first step is to record the activities which are being carried out in the workplace and to identify which activities involve or may involve, potential hazards, such as fire, cuts to hands, poisoning, etc.

Document the hazards which one might expect could result in significant harm under the conditions existing in your workplace. These might include:

• Slips and trip hazards
• Manual handling
• Fire
• Noise
• Chemicals
• Poor lighting
• etc

You should also list groups of people involved in the work or who might be affected, for example:

• Office staff
• Operators
• Maintenance personnel 
• Contractors
• etc

You then need to consider whether sufficient precautions have been taken to guard against the risk of the hazards. These might include:

• Adequate information, instruction and training
• Adequate systems or procedures

In carrying out your risk assessment, you need to consider the Risk Factor. This is determined by the following equation:

LIKELIHOOD OF OCCURRENCE × HAZARD SEVERITY = RISK

The likelihood of occurrence and also the hazard severity should be assessed on a scale of 1 to 5.

Using the equation above, a risk factor can be determined ranging from 1 (no severity and unlikely to happen) to 25 (just waiting to happen with disastrous, widespread results, possibly with one or more fatalities). This qualitative information can be used to determine the urgency of action.

A comprehensive article about Risk Assessments can be found in the CFA’s Guide to Contract Flooring, which is available as a free download from the CFA website.