Hazard identification, risk assessment & risk control in the workplace

Purpose
To provide guidance to employers in relation to hazard identification, risk assessment and risk control in the workplace.

What is hazard identification, risk assessment, risk control?
Hazard identification is the process used to identify all the possible situations in the workplace where people may be exposed to injury, illness or disease.

“Find it”

Risk assessment is the process used to determine the likelihood that people may be exposed to injury, illness or disease in the workplace arising from any situation identified during the hazard identification process.

“Assess it”

Risk control is the process used to identify all practicable measures for eliminating or reducing the likelihood of injury, illness or disease in the workplace, to implement the measures and to continually review the measures in order to ensure their effectiveness.

“Fix it”

Why are they important?
As an employer, you have your business objectives as well as moral and legal obligations to provide and maintain a safe and healthy workplace.

To effectively manage your business (including health and safety in your workplace) and discharge your moral and legal obligations, it is imperative for:

any potentially hazardous situations (which may cause injury, illness or disease) in your workplace to be identified on an ongoing basis before they occur;
the likelihood of each of the hazardous situations occurring to be assessed;
if there is any likelihood of occurrence, appropriate measures to prevent their occurrence to be identified and effectively implemented; and
the measures to be continually reviewed to ensure their effectiveness.
The terms “hazard identification”, “risk assessment” and “risk control” are commonly used to summarise the systematic approach for undertaking the above activities for managing workplace health and safety.

What does the law require?
The Occupational Health and Safety (Manual Handling) Regulations 1999 require employers to ensure that:

•any task undertaken, or to be undertaken, by an employee involving hazardous manual handling is identified;
•an assessment is made to determine whether there is any risk (likelihood of injury, illness or disease) of a musculoskeletal disorder affecting an employee occurring as a result of that task; and
•any risk is eliminated, or if that is not practicable, reduced so far as is practicable.
The Occupational Health and Safety (Plant) Regulations 1995 require employers to ensure that:

all hazards (potential to cause injury or illness) associated with the installation, commissioning, erection, operation, inspection, maintenance, repair, service and cleaning of plant and associated systems of work are identified;
an assessment is made to determine whether there is any risk (likelihood of injury or illness) associated with the identified hazards; and
any risk is eliminated, or if that is not practicable, reduced so far as is practicable.
The Occupational Health and Safety (Hazardous Substances) Regulations 1999 require employers to ensure that:

an assessment is made to determine whether there is any risk (likelihood of injury, illness or disease) associated with the use of a hazardous substance at the workplace; and
any risk is eliminated, or if that is not practicable, reduced so far as is practicable.
The Occupational Health and Safety (Noise) Regulations 2004 require employers to ensure that:

any risk to employees from exposure to noise is identified; and
employees’ exposure to noise is controlled so as to minimise risk to health and safety.
The Occupational Health and Safety (Confined Spaces) Regulations 1996 require employers to ensure that:

all hazards (potential to cause injury or illness) associated with work in a confined space are identified;
an assessment is made to determine whether there is any risk (likelihood of injury or illness) associated with the identified hazards; and
any risk is eliminated, or if that is not practicable, reduced so far as is practicable.
The Occupational Health and Safety (Lead) Regulations 2000 require employers to ensure that:

an assessment is made to determine whether there is any risk (likelihood of injury, illness or disease) associated with the use of lead at the workplace; and
any risk is eliminated, or if that is not practicable, reduced so far as is practicable.
The Regulations require employers to consult with the health and safety representative of a designated work group if practicable when undertaking hazard identification, risk assessment or control of risk processes that may affect the health or safety of any member of the designated work group.

Hazard identification
Hazards in a workplace can arise from a number of sources including:

poor workplace design;
hazardous tasks being performed in the workplace;
poorly designed plant being introduced into the workplace;
incorrect installation, commissioning, use, inspection, maintenance, service, repair or alteration of plant in the workplace; and
people being exposed to hazardous substances, processes or environment.
The hazard identification process is designed to identify all the possible situations where people may possibly be exposed to injury, illness and disease arising from all sources including the above.

Prior to the introduction of any plant, substances, processes or work practices in the workplace, it is essential for the hazard identification process to be carried out to identify whether there is any potential for injury, illness or disease associated with such introduction. This will assist you to take the necessary actions for what may otherwise be extremely costly further down the track if no action is taken at this early stage.

Carrying out hazard identification for all existing plant, substances, processes and work practices in your workplace may require some effort. If you have a large workplace, it is a good idea to split it into several discrete areas for the hazard identification process, and to tackle one area at a time. Priority should be given to areas with hazardous plant, substances, processes or environment.

In order to minimise the time involved, it is better to perform hazard identification on all sources of hazards in a particular area of the workplace instead of doing each hazard source (eg plant, hazardous substances etc) at a time.

The relevant health and safety representatives need to be consulted during the hazard identification process.

Employees working in the area have day to day experience of any hazards and should be involved in the hazard identification process. Advice should also be sought from people who are associated with the activities and processes in the area because they may provide valuable input.

People undertaking hazard identification should have the necessary training to look for:

Mechanical hazards including:
•”drawing in” points
•shearing points
•impact and crushing areas
•cutting areas
•entanglement areas
•stabbing points
•abrasion areas
•flying particles
•any protrusions which could cause injury
Non-mechanical hazards including:
•ergonomic hazards including manual handling
•electrical shocks and burns
•chemical burns, toxicity, flammability
•noise
•vibration
•radiation
•mist, dust, fumes
•suffocation
•engulfment
•biological hazards, viral
•slipping, tripping and falling hazards
•falling objects
•high pressure fluid
•high temperature objects
•working in very hot or cold conditions

Checklists should be developed to assist people who are involved in the hazard identification process in the systematic identification of hazards. WorkSafe Victoria has a publication called “Plant Hazard Checklist” which can assist in the development of hazard identification checklists for plant for use in your workplace. WorkSafe Victoria also produced a number of approved Codes of Practice which would assist in the development of hazard identification checklists for other hazards in your workplace. Those Codes of Practice are listed in the “Further information” section of this document. Some of these codes eg Manual Handling have checklists for use in workplaces.

Hazards in the workplace can change from day to day. In order to effectively manage workplace health and safety you need to introduce proper systems and procedures to ensure hazard identification is carried out on a regular basis. The OHS legislation requires you to repeat the hazard identification process:

before any alteration to plant or any change in the way plant is used or a system of work associated with plant, including a change in the location of plant;
before any alteration is made to objects used in the workplace or to systems of work which include a task involving manual handling, including a change in the place where a task is carried out;
before plant is used for any other purpose than for which it was designed;
before an object is used for another purpose than for which it was designed if that other purpose may result in the person carrying out hazardous manual handling;
if new or additional information about hazards becomes available to you; and
if an occurrence of a musculoskeletal disorder in your workplace is reported by or on behalf of an employee.
Risk assessment
Once the hazards have been identified, they should be listed for a risk assessment to be carried out in consultation with the relevant health and safety representatives and employees.

The purpose of risk assessment is to determine whether there is any likelihood of injury, illness or disease associated with each of the potentially hazardous situations identified in the hazard identification process by considering:

whether any person (workers and visitors) would be exposed to the identified situations under all possible scenarios (eg during installation, commissioning, erection, operation, inspection, maintenance, repair, service and cleaning of plant);
what existing measures are in place to protect the health and safety of people who may be exposed; and
how adequate the existing measures are for protecting the health and safety of people who may be exposed.
If the likelihood that anyone will be exposed to a situation under all possible scenarios is nil, then there is no risk and no additional risk control measures are required.

The adequacy of existing control measures should be considered if there is the potential that someone may be exposed to a particular situation.

Existing control measures should not be regarded as adequate simply because an incident hasn’t occurred. This particularly applies where the existing control measures are only administrative controls (eg training, safety procedures, safety signs, supervision) or personal protective equipment (eg safety gloves, safety glasses). These types of control rely heavily on human behaviour in doing the right thing and any deviation in behaviour (eg employees not following the safety procedures because some person or situation is distracting them) could cause injury, illness or disease.

Risk control
Under the OHS legislation, you are required to introduce new control measures to eliminate the risk, or if that is not reasonably practicable, to reduce the risk so far as is reasonably practicable, if the current measures are found to be inadequate and there is a likelihood that injury, illness or disease will result from a particular situation.

The term “reasonably practicable” has a particular meaning under the OHS legislation. It means practicable having regard to:

the likelihood of a hazard or risk occurring (i.e. the probability of a person being exposed to harm);
the degree of harm that woudl result if the hazard or risk occurred (i.e the potential seriousness of injury or harm);
what the epson concerned knows, or ought reasonably know, about the hazard or risk and any ways of eliminating or reducing that hazard or risk;
the availabilityand suitability of ways to eliminate or reduce the hazard or risk; and
the cost of eliminating or reducing the hazard or risk.
The risk control process must be carried out in consultation with the relevant health and safety representatives and employees.

In identifying new risk control measures, the most effective form of control measures is to eliminate the risk (eg by eliminating the process). If that is not reasonably practicable you need to identify effective measures to reduce the risk. The OHS legislation specifies that you must not depend solely on the use of administrative controls or personal protective equipment to reduce the risk unless that you have established that the following are not practicable measures:

substituting the plant or substance with another one that is less hazardous
using engineering controls (eg modifying the design of the workplace or plant, or environmental conditions)
isolating people from the source of exposure
changing the objects used in the task involving manual handling
using mechanical aids for manual handling tasks
Before any decision is taken as to which type of risk control measures ought to be used, consideration should be given to the severity of injury, illness or disease that could occur. If the severity is high (ie fatality, serious injury etc), a higher hierarchy order of control (ie elimination, substitution, engineering controls, isolation) should be used. Sometimes they may have to be used in combination with administrative controls and in some cases personal protective equipment.

It is not always reasonably practicable to immediately implement the higher hierarchy of control and there may still be a need to keep the process/activity going. In such situations interim control measures (in the form of administrative controls in combination with personal protective equipment) may be used until the higher hierarchy of control can be implemented.

Note: If there is an immediate risk to health or safety, you must make sure the process/activity in question is ceased until measures are taken to remove the immediate risk.

Once a decision is taken on the suitable risk control measures, a plan should be developed in consultation with the relevant health and safety representatives and employees for the implementation of those measures. The implementation plan should identify:

the actions required
implementation timetable
who are responsible for the implementation of the actions
Those people who have been allocated responsibility for implementing actions should be adequately briefed on the expectations.

You need to make sure progress towards the implementation plan is monitored with enough lead time to take any corrective actions necessary to complete the plan on time. If you discover a need for corrective action, document them in their own implementation plan in the same way as you have done for the overall plan.

Once the new risk control measures are in place, you need to make sure that they are maintained. Consult with the relevant employees to identify whether there are new hazards requiring attention. If there are, then repeat the hazard identification, risk assessment and risk control processes.

Record keeping
Maintenance of appropriate records will assist you to:

know what has been done and what more needs to be done; and
demonstrate compliance with your obligations under the OHS legislation.
You should keep documents which provide information on:

when and where hazard identification was carried out
a summary of identified hazards
whether there is any risk associated with each hazard identified?
the risk assessment method used
what new measures have been identified to control any risk?
what measures are regarded as not reasonably practicable and the reason for such?
what are the reasonably practicable risk control measures for implementation?
timeline and responsible person for the implementation of the practicable risk control measures
who was involved in the hazard identification, risk assessment and risk control processes?
Who was consulted in the hazard identification, risk assessment and risk control processes?