How to write a risk assessment

WHAT ARE THE FIVE STEPS TO RISK ASSESSMENT?

The Health and Safety Executive (HSE) advises employers to follow five steps when carrying out a workplace risk assessment:

Step 1: Identify hazards, i.e. anything that may cause harm.

Employers have a duty to assess the health and safety risks faced by their workers. Your employer must systematically check for possible physical, mental, chemical and biological hazards.

This is one common classification of hazards:

• Physical: e.g. lifting, awkward postures, slips and trips, noise, dust, machinery, computer equipment, etc.
• Mental: e.g. excess workload, long hours, working with high-need clients, bullying, etc. These are also called 'psychosocial' hazards, affecting mental health and occurring within working relationships.
• Chemical: e.g. asbestos, cleaning fluids, aerosols, etc.
• Biological: including tuberculosis, hepatitis and other infectious diseases faced by healthcare workers, home care staff and other healthcare professionals.

Step 2: Decide who may be harmed, and how.

Identifying who is at risk starts with your organisation's own full- and part-time employees. Employers must also assess risks faced by agency and contract staff, visitors, clients and other members of the public on their premises.

Employers must review work routines in all the different locations and situations where their staff are employed. For example:

• Home care supervisors must take due account of their client's personal safety in the home, and ensure safe working and lifting arrangements for their own home care staff.
• In a supermarket, hazards are found in the repetitive tasks at the checkout, in lifting loads, and in slips and trips from spillages and obstacles in the shop and storerooms. Staff face the risk of violence from customers and intruders, especially in the evenings.
• In call centres, workstation equipment (i.e. desk, screen, keyboard and chair) must be adjusted to suit each employee.

Employers have special duties towards the health and safety of young workers, disabled employees, nightworkers, shiftworkers, and pregnant or breastfeeding women.

Step 3: Assess the risks and take action.

This means employers must consider how likely it is that each hazard could cause harm. This will determine whether or not your employer should reduce the level of risk. Even after all precautions have been taken, some risk usually remains. Employers must decide for each remaining hazard whether the risk remains high, medium or low.

Step 4: Make a record of the findings.

Employers with five or more staff are required to record in writing the main findings of the risk assessment. This record should include details of any hazards noted in the risk assessment, and action taken to reduce or eliminate risk.

This record provides proof that the assessment was carried out, and is used as the basis for a later review of working practices. The risk assessment is a working document. You should be able to read it. It should not be locked away in a cupboard.

Step 5: Review the risk assessment.

A risk assessment must be kept under review in order to:

• ensure that agreed safe working practices continue to be applied (e.g. that management's safety instructions are respected by supervisors and line managers); and
• take account of any new working practices, new machinery or more demanding work targets.

HOW SHOULD MY EMPLOYER DEAL WITH HAZARDS?

The basic rule is that employers must adapt the work to the worker. The key aims of risk assessment are to:

• prioritise the risks – i.e. rank them in order of seriousness; and
• make all risks small – the two main options here are to:
  • eliminate the hazard altogether; or
  • if this is not possible, control the risks so that harm is unlikely.

The Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations 1999 set out safety management guidance for employers for tackling risks, which you can find in schedule 1 (General Principles of Prevention). The basic approach is also known as a 'hierarchy of control' because it sets out the order in which employers must approach risk management:

1. Substitution (i.e. try a risk-free or less risky option).
2. Prevention (e.g. erect a machine guard, or add a non-slip surface to a pathway).
3. Reorganise work to reduce exposure to a risk. A basic rule is to adapt the work to the worker. In an office, ensure chairs and display screen equipment (DSE) are adjustable to the individual, and plan all work involving a computer to include regular breaks. For monotonous or routine work, introduce work variety and greater control over work. In call centres, introduce work variety by providing work off the phones and varying the type of calls handled.
4. As a last resort, issue personal protective equipment (PPE) to all staff at risk, and make sure they are trained in when and how to use this equipment, such as appropriate eye protection, gloves, special clothing, footwear.
5. Provide training in safe working systems.
6. Provide information on likely hazards and how to avoid them.
7. Provide social and welfare facilities, such as washing facilities for the removal of contamination, or a rest room.

HOW OFTEN SHOULD A RISK ASSESSMENT TAKE PLACE?

The Health and Safety Executive (HSE) says risk should be assessed "every time there are new machines, substances and procedures, which could lead to new hazards." 

An employer should carry out a risk assessment: 

• whenever a new job brings in significant new hazards. If there is high staff turnover, then the way new staff do their work should be checked against the risk assessment, and training provided in safe working practices if necessary;
• whenever something happens to alert the employer to the presence of a hazard – for example, an unusual volume of sickness absence, complaints of stress and bullying, or unusually high staff turnover;
• in response to particular changes to the level of risk to individual employees – for example, where an employee returns to work after a period of long-term sickness absence; or
• Where an employee is pregnant or breastfeeding and her work might involve a risk to her or her unborn child’s health and safety. (Regulation 16, Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations 1999).