Risk assessment: Mitigate the risks!

What is a risk assessment? It is the process of identifying hazards that may exist, how they may cause harm, and what steps can be taken to minimise them.

In any situation we are constantly thinking about the outcome of our (and sometimes other’s) actions.

What is the result if I drop this bottle?

What happens if I overload that shelf?

We are constantly risk assessing our environment, although we may not always be aware of it. A risk assessment document proves to any investigator that we have consciously thought about the risks, assessed them, and decided if the activity is safe enough to proceed.

Teachers are responsible for risk assessments of their own practical work, there may be some already written that are generic for many lessons, but the teacher must appraise and update these for their own class/lab etc.

Technicians are responsible for risk assessing procedures that they do, for example diluting acids, making gases, transporting radioactive items.

You can use a simple table to categorise the overall risk of an activity, comparing the chance of an accident happening, to how severe the outcome would be if an accident did happen:

WHAT DOES THIS MEAN?

If the chance of the risk happening is very unlikely and if it did happen the severity was negligible, the risk would be deemed low (therefore ‘safe’). For example, the chance of a wall shelf, sited at the back of the laboratory (away from students) falling off the wall: with the shelf correctly secured to the wall the chance of it falling is very low, and the chance of it injuring people is also low, as no one sits near to it. Therefore, this would score ‘low’ on the risk assessment. However, if the shelf were sited near to students, the chance of injury if it did fall would be high, this would then score ‘medium’ on the risk assessment.

Conversely, if the chance of the risk happening was highly likely and the outcome if it did happen was severe, then the risk is ‘high’ (and thus unsafe) e.g., an unruly class setting light to gas taps with the outcome of burning someone or setting fire to the lab.

Once the risk assessment is done, you can mitigate for the risks. In the example above, the gas would not be turned on before the practical, and the class would not be left unsupervised.

Most risks can be mitigated with planning and attention to the individual situation, with plans in place should anything go wrong (extra supervision for that particular class and someone waiting at the emergency gas stop button should an incident occur).