Health & Safety Risk Assessment

Define hazards as sources of harm, explain risk as the likelihood of harm with its severity, and distinguish incidents, near-misses, and accidents (e.g., electricity or damaged cords).

Identify hazards, assess the risks they generate, and eliminate or control those risks, as risk assessment extends our automatic self-preservation into workplace safety.

Explore how risk assessment prevents death and injuries, avoids equipment damage, and reduces financial loss and legal enforcement actions.

Identify routine and non-routine activities and hazards with a competent team, identify workers and others at risk, evaluate controls, and review assessment to meet legal requirements and keep risk low.

Identify hazards, identify who might be harmed and how, and begin the five-step process of risk assessment. Record findings and review or update the assessment as needed.

Identify all significant hazards in the workplace to enable effective risk management and control; risk assessment identifies potential harms, not only those poorly controlled.

Explore how hazards are classified into physical, mechanical, chemical, biological, ergonomic, and psychological categories, with a brief discussion of each type.

Explore physical hazards such as electricity, noise, vibration, and radiation as environmental risks in the workplace. Learn their effects, including electric shocks, burns, fires, hearing loss, numbness, and radiation-related illnesses.

Identify and assess mechanical hazards arising from dangerous moving parts, including entanglement, impact, abrasion, ejection, cutting, and crushing, to prevent injuries.

Identify chemical hazards from exposure to harmful, corrosive, toxic, and carcinogenic substances. Understand examples like petrol, cement, arsenic, and asbestos, and how these hazards affect health and safety.

Identify biological hazards and understand how exposure to viruses, bacteria, fungi, and insects poses health risks in the workplace.

Identify ergonomic hazards in the work environment that harm the musculoskeletal system, including excessive force, long duration and high frequency of activity, repetitive movements, and unnatural postures.

Identify psychological hazards in the workplace that affect workers' mental health, including work-related stress, bullying and harassment, violence in lone or remote work, and fatigue.

Identify hazards in the workplace through risk assessment techniques, with workplace inspection as a key physical observation to spot unsafe acts or conditions.

Use job hazard analysis to identify hazards, record task steps, and evaluate risks at each step, then develop and monitor a safe working method to control them.

Involve workers to leverage their practical experience and knowledge of the process to identify methods of work and the nature of risks. They may notice hazards not immediately obvious.

Learn to identify hazards and safe use of chemicals using material safety data sheets, and review typical msds contents such as exposure limits, health hazards, first aid, and disposal.

Use incidents and ill health data to uncover root causes of incidents, illnesses, injuries, or property damage and reveal less obvious hazards that may go unnoticed.

Apply legal standards to identify significant hazards in the workplace, such as working at height, and use a competent assessor to determine if a task counts as working at height.

Identify the categories of people exposed to each hazard, including employees, contractors, visitors, and the public, to guide control measures.

Explore how to estimate risk by calculating likelihood times severity, using quantitative and semi-quantitative methods, and applying a risk matrix to prioritize controls.

Identify controls using the hierarchy of controls to reduce risks to an acceptable level, prioritizing elimination, substitution or reduction, isolation, exposure control, and PPE.

Understand hazard elimination as the first, most effective risk control in the hierarchy of controls, removing hazards to eliminate risk, with forklifts as an example and notes on new risks.

Explore hierarchy of controls with a focus on risk reduction when elimination is not feasible, replacing a hazard with lower risk solutions, such as using a trolley for manual handling.

Isolate hazards by using barriers between workers and the hazard, enclose a noisy machine to reduce exposure to noise, and move the work to a well-ventilated control room.

Apply the hierarchy of controls to manage exposure by engineering solutions like local ventilation, and administrative measures such as safe work systems, supervision, training, and reducing exposure time.

Understand the hierarchy of controls, with PPE as the last line of defense against hazards. Examples include helmet, gloves, safety shoes, eye protection, and harness, dependent on proper fit.

Evaluate control measures by short- and long-term impact, cost, and effectiveness; prioritize options for their strength despite higher cost and longer implementation, while ensuring proportionality, legal standards, and user competence.

Record the key findings of the risk assessment, including hazards, risk levels, and control measures, noting activities covered, groups at risk, the date of assessment, and who carried it out.

Review and update the risk assessment after accidents or near misses, audits, and changes in activities, equipment, or personnel, to correct deficiencies and reflect new legal requirements or technologies.

In this case study, perform a practical risk assessment for electric arc welding in a hydrocarbon pipeline. Identify hazards, apply severity and likelihood scores, and implement control measures.