Health and safety risks at work

As an employer, you must assess and manage health and safety risks – whether you are a big business, a small business or just a one-person operation. Accidents and ill health can ruin lives and damage your business. You are not expected to eliminate all risk, but you are required to protect people as far as ‘reasonably practicable’.

A risk assessment is an important tool in protecting your workers and your business. It helps you focus on those risks that have the potential to cause harm. Most of these can be readily controlled by straightforward measures.

Once you have completed the assessment it is important to put your results into practice. If you need to make a number of improvements, you should produce an action plan to deal with the most important first. You should review your assessment on an ongoing basis to make sure that it remains up to date and effective.

If you run a business, however big or small, you must carry out a careful examination of what in your work could cause harm to people.

You must decide what in your work could cause harm to:

• you
• your employees, should you have any
• members of the public

This is so that you can weigh up whether you have taken enough precautions or should do more to prevent harm.

There are five steps to any risk assessment:

• identify the hazards
• decide who might be harmed by them and how
• evaluate the risks and decide on precautions
• record your findings and implement them
• review your assessment and update it if necessary

Don’t overcomplicate the process – risk assessments should be ‘suitable and sufficient’. If your risks are well known and the necessary control measures are easy to apply, your risk assessment should also be simple.

If your business is small and you are confident that you understand what’s involved, you can do the assessment yourself – you don’t have to be a health and safety expert. If you work in a larger business you could ask a health and safety expert to help you. If you are not confident, get help from someone who is competent. In all cases, you should make sure that you involve your staff or their representatives in the process – they may have useful information about how the work is done, which will make your assessment of the risk more thorough and effective.

All hazards need to be considered in risk assessments. A hazard is anything with the potential to cause harm. A risk is the likelihood that someone could be harmed by a hazard, together with an indication of how serious the harm could be.

Legal documents for : Health and safety policies – construction safety plan

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