Risk Assessments - How to do a Risk Assessment

Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations 1999

Conducting a Risk Assessment

There are many ways to conduct a risk assessment.  The most important thing is that you:  

Identify the hazards

Decide who might be harmed and how

Evaluate the risks and decide on the precautions that need to be taken to eliminate or reduce the risk

Record your findings and implement them

Review your assessment and update it if necessary

You are only required to record “significant” findings.  Don’t overcomplicate the process. In most businesses, the risks are well known and the necessary control measures are easy to apply and probably already in place. 

You don’t have to be a health and safety expert to do a risk assessment.  If you run a small organisation and you are confident you understand what’s involved, you can do the assessment yourself or ask a competent employee or colleague to do it for you but remember, you are responsible for seeing that the assessment is carried out properly.

If you are not confident that you are competent to do the assessment yourself then we will be happy to help and we will provide a full quote in advance so that you know what you are going to have to pay.

In all cases, you should make sure that you involve your staff in the process. They will have useful information about how the work is done that will make your assessment of the risk more thorough and effective.

When thinking about your risk assessment, remember:

a hazard is anything that may cause harm, such as trailing wires, electricity, working from ladders, changes in floor levels, stairs, blocked doorways etc

the risk is the chance, high or low, that somebody could be harmed by these and other hazards, together with an indication of how serious the harm could be.

Purchase a risk assessment


Additional Reading:

What is a Risk Assessment?
How to Conduct a Risk Assessment?
Rating a Risk?

 

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Contains public sector information published by the Health and Safety Executive under the Open Government Licence