Risk Assessment: The Starting Point of Health and Safety Management Systems
Starting at the Beginning
Over the past couple of years, the focus on a systematic approach to worker health and safety has never been greater. Whether due to unprecedented illness records due to the pandemic or a greater focus on how their workers’ health impacts a company’s sustainability, it is something that is gaining momentum. A key first step in creating the basis for an occupational health and safety management system is to assess the risks that a company faces. This assessment is the starting point to controlling risks and keeping workers healthy and safe.
Tackle the Most Important Things First
One of the key advantages of a risk-based approach is that the most important and risky things are worked on first. Every organization has a limit to their available resources. Allocation of these resources is critical. Traditional job hazard analysis does not provide as distinct of a list of priorities as using a risk-based approach. Hazards are simply identified for control with little or no explicit ranking of needed action. Incorporating risk analysis into job hazard analysis is the key to prioritizing controls to best utilize resources.
Take Advantage of Worker Participation
Cornerstone begins the task of evaluating worker health and safety hazards and their risks with a risk-based workplace hazard assessment. This is a cooperative practice with the workers who face the hazards. Along with HSE managers and supervisors in the work areas, each job and its tasks are assessed to determine the hazards present. The team then determines the risk of negative outcomes from each task by judging the severity and probability of the negative outcome. They assign a numerical score to each risk and the product of those gives us a risk level for each hazard.
Control the Risks
We determine an acceptable risk level with the team and anything that exceeds that level requires action. Our staff will then determine required or recommended controls for each hazard. We use the US OSHA (Occupational Safety and Health Administration) Hierarchy of Controls to guide this part of the assessment. In the end, Cornerstone Health and Safety evaluators produce a prioritized list of needed controls. Those hazards with a higher risk level demand more urgent action. This action is designed to reduce the risk level. Either through eliminating the hazard, minimizing the severity, or decreasing the probability, the list of hazards and their risk level shifts as controls are implemented. This automatically shuffles the priorities so that, again, the highest risks are controlled first.
Whether done to conform to an ISO Standard, for ESG (Environmental, Social and Governance) efforts, or simply to improve as a corporate citizen, the development of a formal occupational health and safety management system is more and more commonplace. Nearly all formal standards rely on a risk-based analysis of hazards as a starting point for the system. These analyses help organizations identify all the hazards, determine the level of risk they present, and prioritize them for action. Talk to Cornerstone more about how we can help you in your efforts to continually improve your occupational health and safety management system.
