Risk Assessments: The 5 Steps

Risk assessments are vital in ensuring you protect your employees and business – they also ensure you are complying with the law. Risk assessments should be carried out at any time you or your employees carry out work which could cause individuals or others injury or ill health.
Risk assessments are crucial in health and safety management to assist in reducing incidents/ accidents and to comply with the Health and Safety at Work Act 1974.
Be mindful of who is conducting your risk assessments as the individual should be competent, able to evaluate the risk, categorise sufficiently and identify hazards and control measures required to reduce the risk.
We can break down how we carry out our risk assessments into five steps to ensure our assessments are correct and sufficient:
1 – Identify the hazards
A hazard is a source of potential harm which can be identified by using numerous techniques such as asking employees, looking at your accident records or inspections of your workplace
We must not confuse a ‘hazard’ with a ‘risk’. When evaluating a ‘risk’ we could consider the chance or probability of a person being harmed when exposed to a ‘hazard’
2 – Consider who could be harmed and how
You need to consider who could be exposed to the hazards – you, your employees, members of the public, contractors or clients
3 -  Evaluation of risks and control measures
This step is where we consider how we would protect those exposed to the hazards – we would consider can the hazard be removed or can we control the risk so injury is unlikely.  It is important to identify the control measures that need to be implemented to reduce the risk of injury or harm.
4 – Document findings
This step allows us to evidence what we have considered and identified as potential hazards, who could be exposed to the hazards and how we intend on reducing/ eliminating the potential risks and hazards. It is also good to get into the practice of documenting findings – if there are 5 or more employees it is a legal requirement to do this
5 – Review your risk assessments regularly
The potential hazards and risks could change on a regular basis so it is always good practice to review your risk assessments regularly and make any required amendments.  The review of a risk assessment would be required after an incident/accident, where there is a change in process, equipment or personnel.
 
We can assist you with carrying out Risk Assessments within your company or we can review your existing assessments to ensure they are suitable and efficient – for more information please email info@coregenic.co.uk
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