If peace and harmony is what you want – shut up shop! Or moderate every post (would quickly have the same effect).

Mark

Hi, at the place that I left ten years ago where I worked, I was one of many who had risk assessment training, from there we did risk assessments for all the regular jobs that came up. These were all filed so that they could be used in conjunction with an easy to use risk assessment form with double duplicates. There were many tick boxes plus comment and instruction boxes with start/stop times and date and included all the names of those working on the job and they worked well. The best part about the initial risk assessments was, that they were all done by up to six people working in pairs or individually and then compiled together and finally reviewed. Another good thing was that the risk assessment forms could not be filled out by anyone working on the job that was assessed. New jobs were always done by three or more people, which included at least one person who worked in whatever department the assessment was for and all assessments were reviewed on a regular basis. Accidents and near misses were very infrequent with this system in place, so I believe they are an a good thing when done in a realistic manner. Hot work permits and some processing permits were separate to risk assessments, but the risk assessment could state that these would be needed, so there were many hot work and processing permit methods also on file, There were also various lock-off procedures on file, which could be used on the risk assessment whenever needed.

Regards Nick.

Edited By Nicholas Farr on 07/08/2016 22:55:32

Between 1974 and 2015:

• fatal injuries to employees have fallen by 86% (RIDDOR);
• reported non-fatal injuries have fallen by 77% (to 2011/12) (RIDDOR);

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80% of industrial capacity in this country has been annihilated in that period so the statistics are kinda misleading…. entire industries, sometimes massive industries, have completely disappeared

Pick an industry that has the same outputs as we had back in the old days? Focusing on Construction for example may be more appropriate.

I'm not advocating that our workplaces should be risky but there's a general observation that society has become much more risk averse over recent years. Kids being driven to school rather than walking themselves etc etc.

Often as not because people don't really understand risk, uncertainty and small probabilities, risk avoidance is out of all proportion of the dangers.

Heinz Wolff, a brilliant guy of the Great Egg Race fame, is really interesting on the subject of Risk…

**LINK**

In it he makes the point that we all need some risk in our lives and that in some ways safer and safer cars and workplaces makes us get our fixes in different ways.

I remember him saying that the way we cosset the old and protect them from risk in our society is pretty dumb since they have the least to lose of any of us!

Jon

I would say that the fishing guys carry the greatest day to day risk, however there's not so many around nowadays in the UK

I'll always remember those wee fishing boats in the Bay of Biscay during a force 8+ blow., we had to heave to and face into the swell or it was going to smash our cargo deck up

Up and down in mountainous seas 24/7 as they worked away. sleeping must have been almost impossible

My definitions.

Risk Management: Look before you leap.

Risk assessment: Some kind of documentation to prove you have looked.

and then there are the insurers . . . . .

Martin

To be fair most of the jobs people do now have changed, people are no longer exposed to the same risks as working in a steel mill or coal mine or factory line.

Sitting at a desk in an office is going to be much safer no matter which way you look at it,(unless maybe theres a psycho sitting next to you, or the office block was built on the rim of an active volcano) the physical activity is nil, and the more of it you do, the greater the chance you'll end up in an accident.

And telling someone "don't push that button etc…" they're basically going to do it at that point. I hate teachers who think they can "force" education into people, you can't make someone learn, they have to choose to learn, they aren't computers. So i find people learn about risks from mistakes. 

So before they start praising they can't actually show it's entirely down to policy. Its like the police cuts, crime is dropping and the officers being reduced and they use correlation as evidence their policy is working, wrong, it isn't proof, it doesn't justify the causes.

Piracy has declined since the 1700's and pollution has increased, somalia has little pollution and a high incidence of piracy, who would be willing to support a correlation there as proof that pirates are eco friendly?

Michael W

Edited By Michael Walters on 08/08/2016 11:26:52

Ady- does the fact that gales were forecast for the NW count as risk assessment ? Or just management- we have to have there by Wednesday ? Anyway I prefer natural selection, it used to work.

I don't think that there is any need to bring in so called professional risk assessment people and in many respects HSE either. The main aspect of risk assessment is that some one does think about risk and documents it. The very fact that the subject has been mentioned will influence how people work. The docs are needed for legal reasons.

Statistics can be very misleading unless all possible factors are included. More companies now equip the people that work for them correctly and also often make sure that people make use of it. On the machine tool side few people would actually get in a CNC machine booth when it's running. At home we might disable interlocks of one sort or another. Unlikely to be allowed in a workplace except if essential.

Ladder training courses are likely to reduce the number of people who fall off them. There are a number of others just like that. In some cases the courses are a lot longer and might even need refreshers now and again.

John

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LOL the self employed have more drive to do what ever it is they did.

Not that this is funny really.

I needed a roofer some months back. He had been off work for about 6 months, bones mending. Normally he would go right up onto what is a rather high steep roof via ladders. This time he started going up and came down and said to me no scaffold. Turned a cheap job into a more expensive one. Really he aught to own a platform. A builder we had working on a window on the 3rd floor did exactly that but hired one.

John

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Edited By Ajohnw on 08/08/2016 18:07:16