Guide to Risk Assessment

This guidance briefly describes how to carry out a risk assessment based on the HSE Five Steps to Risk Assessment. Risk assessments must address the specific intended work and be carried out by competent persons. The principal investigator or manager of the work is responsible for ensuring the risks associated with the work are properly assessed and recorded. The following guidance is given to help you carry out risk assessments but is not a comprehensive overview of the law and it does not include all of the requirements. Guidance on risk assessment is also provided on the HSE website.

HSE Risk Management
HSE Five Steps to Risk Assessment
HSE Example Risk Assessments

The USO provides a training course for staff and postgraduate students completing risk assessments. For further information about the session see the course brief or go to the training pages.

Essentials of Risk Assessment

1. Assess risks to people arising from the use of the hazards in the work.
2. Responsibility of managers and principal investigators.
3. Risk assessments must be suitable and sufficient, comprehensive, systematic and appropriate for the level of risk.
4. Must be done in advance and by a competent person.
5. Consider the hazards and the work activity.
6. Decide who or what might be harmed and how.
7. Decide what control measures are necessary to prevent or adequately control exposure and minimise the risks.
8. Implement the control measures.
9. Consider whether health surveillance is required.
10. Ensure there are procedures to deal with accidents and emergencies.
11. Ensure workers are properly instructed, trained and supervised to enable them to safely and competently perform the work.
12. Consult and communicate with workers and safety officers etc.
13. Keep risk assessments and records.
14. Review risk assessment and amend if it is no longer valid or where there are significant changes to activity or risks.

Stage 1: Complete a Risk Assessment Form

A suitable and sufficient risk assessment is required by law for work involving any hazards. Firstly you need to download a risk assessment form.

General Risk Assessment Form

The risk assessment should be completed using a computer and should not be written by hand.  It is important to understand the difference between hazard and risk. The main purpose of your risk assessment is to identify the hazards, decide who is at risk, assess the level of risks to people, and decide on suitable controls to ensure that the work can be done safely. Risk assessments are expected to be of a high standard, particularly in respect to clarity, justification of statements on hazards and risks and the identification of control measures. Risk assessments need to be sufficiently specific but should be understood by non-experts (eg workers, safety officers or HSE inspectors). It is very important that the risk assessment is clear and statements about risks and controls are properly justified.

Please note: Do not use this form for COSHH, BioCOSHH or GM risk assessments. These types of work require specific risk assessments forms which must be used for those activities and are available in the relevant pages of the website.

Basic Information

In this section you need to give basic information about the project or work and who is in responsible for management of the work.

Title of project or activity
You should provide the title of the project or activity in this section. The title should specify the nature of the work and the hazards.

Principal investigator / Responsible person / Manager
You should provide the name of the principal investigator or the manager who is in charge of the activity in this section.

School
You should provide the name of your School (eg School, Institute or Unit etc).

Date of assessment
You should provide the date on which the assessment was carried out.

Location of work
You should provide the name of the building and room numbers or details of location for field work.

Project or Activity

In this section you need to describe the work that you will be doing.

Brief description of the project or activity
You should provide a brief but sufficiently detailed description of the work to enable other people and non-experts to understand the exact nature of the work (eg workers, safety officers or HSE inspectors).

Hazards, Risks and Controls

Step 1 Identify the hazards
Identify the hazards by doing a ‘walk about’ inspection and thinking through what you will need to do. You can get advice from your SSO, the University Safety Office, USO website HSE website and many other sources. Don’t forget long term hazards that may only cause harm after prolonged exposure.

Step 2 Decide who might be harmed and how
Identify groups of people. Remember: some workers have particular needs; people who may not be in the workplace all the time; members of the public; think about how your work affects others present including cleaners, maintenance etc. Say how the hazard could cause harm.

Step 3 Evaluate the risks and decide on precautions
List what is already in place to reduce the likelihood of harm or make any harm less serious. You need to make sure that you have reduced risks ‘so far as is reasonably practicable’. An easy way of doing this is to compare what you are already doing with good practice. If there is a difference, list what needs to be done.

Step 4 Record your findings and implement them
Remember to prioritise. Deal with those hazards that are high-risk and have serious consequences first.

Step 5 Review your risk assessment and update if necessary
Review your assessment to make sure you are still improving, or at least not sliding back. If there is a significant change in your workplace, remember to check your risk assessment and, where necessary, amend it.

Approval

 The manager, principal investigator or person in charge of the work is responsible for ensuring the risks associated with their work are properly assessed and recorded. The principal investigator or manager may delegate the work of preparing a risk assessment to any competent member of the team but responsibility for approving the risk assessment remains with the principal investigator or manager.

Assessor
The person who carries out the risk assessment on behalf of the principal investigator or person responsible for the work must sign this part of the form. You should consult with other people who might be adversely affected by the activities in your work where it is necessary (eg colleagues, other groups or workers).

Principal investigator / Responsible person / Manager
The principal investigator or person responsible for the work (eg manager, supervisor or course leader) must sign this part of the form to confirm that they have reviewed and approved the risk assessment. You must check that the assessment has been carried out correctly and to a suitable and sufficient standard. Guidance on risk assessment can be obtained from School Safety Officers.

Stage 2: Monitor the Work

The principal investigator or manager must carefully monitor the work. Monitoring is necessary to meet two main objectives. The first is to ensure compliance in the implementation of all the control measures identified as necessary through the risk assessment. Compliance is therefore both necessary and a legal requirement. The second objective is to ensure that the control measures and procedures continue to be appropriate. The review process, discussed below, will provide a point of reference to decide if the risk assessment remains valid, but regular monitoring can identify problems in the interim period. You should regularly check what people are doing and the activities to ensure that the work is done safely. The type of monitoring needed is proportional to the risks, with higher risk work requiring a higher level of monitoring than lower risk work. Where changes or new processes are identified action must be taken and the necessary changes or improvements must be documented in the risk assessment.

Stage 3: Review the Risk Assessment

Risk assessments must be reviewed regularly and immediately if there is any reason to suspect the assessment is no longer valid such as if there has been a significant change to the work or to the risks of the work (eg as a result of changes to the work or monitoring). When reviewing the risk assessment the effectiveness of the preventative or control measures should be carefully re-examined. Risk assessments should in any case be reviewed at least every 2 years. If review of the risk assessment concludes that changes are required then those changes must be made. Never make any changes directly to the original risk assessment form but always to a new version (eg v1, v2, v3 etc) of the form.

Stage 4: Record the Risk Assessment

The principal investigator or manager must keep their risk assessments and any other relevant records. The risk assessment should always be completed by computer so that you will have electronic records. All changes to risk assessments should be made electronically. Always save the original version for your electronic records and make the changes to another version. A copy of the risk assessment should always be available in each defined area where the work is done.

Employers must keep proper records relating to the work such as risk assessments, training records, maintenance and testing records.  Please use the following link to the retention document which will provide further infromation:

http://www.ncl.ac.uk/rm/rrs/rrs-25-HealthSafetyManagement.htm