In my previous two posts I have explained what a risk assessment in and why some assessments need to be written down.
Now that we have made that decision it is time to focus on two key questions:
Question One
How risky is the activity or event?
Question Two
How likely is it that the worst will happen?
How risky is the activity or event? The best way that I’ve found over the years is to assess the risk using a sliding scale from no injury up to a fatality. I can almost hear you thinking that using the word fatality is a bit extreme, but remember that we’re not saying what will happen but what the worst thing that can happen is.
Taking the examples from my previous posts on risk assessments, let’s look at what the risks are:
Cooking - How risky is the activity?
A judgement of no injury is not likely a worst-case scenario,(the most likely being you burn your hand and instantly drop the hot tray) but equally a judgement of a fatality is also not likely.
So how do we assess the risk? It’s definitely likely to cause a minor injury, whilst being unlikely to cause a major injury I would judge that the level of risk is towards the lower end of the scale.
Crossing the road - How risky is the activity?
Again, if you do not consider all elements when crossing a road, the chances of no injury are very unlikely.
It is perfectly possible for a fatality to occur if you misjudged checking that the road was clear before setting out. This is then considered a high risk activity.
The second aspect of risk assessments is a very important one.
How likely is the worst-case scenario to happen?
The answer to this question can balance out the level of risk decided upon in the basic assessment. Again I use a sliding scale from being a remote chance of the worst-case happening to a definite or certain chance of it happening.
Cooking
Getting burnt in the kitchen is a medium level of risk, and it has an equal weight of being likely to happen. Therefore, it is considered a medium risk. We would still put strategies in place to lower the risk level (oven gloves, careful supervision etc.) but we would not need to be as detailed as the previous example.
Crossing the road
Crossing a road could, potentially, be considered a high risk activity. This would depend on whether I was assessing the risk for an adult crossing the road (unlikely to be fatal) or whether it was for a child crossing (much higher risk)
Using a score based system we can get an overall score for the activity before putting in place strategies to reduce the risk. Once those strategies are listed, the level of risk is then reassessed until the level of risk is low or medium.
In my next post I will start to explain how and why we put risk assessments in place specifically for those working with children or in the Performing Arts area.
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