Risk assessment vs training costs
April 1st 2005

Cost-Effective Risk Assessment Training. By Eddie Hines, principal consultant at Sypol

You have heard it time and again - assessing risk is not new. Indeed we all assess risks in our daily lives.

Assessing risk is another way of saying: ‘that looks safe and viable’. This article focuses on obtaining the most practical and financial value from risk assessment training.

A rain forest of documents and articles have been written about risk assessments. ‘Specialists’ have dinedout on the subject for so long that employers can often be forgiven for being intimidated by the whole concept, let alone the cost of training and its monitoring. But there is no need to be. The reality for the vast majority of employers is that risk assessment is little more than common sense. Once formally completed (yes, I am afraid that does mean put in a written format), all can share, see and hopefully understand the immediate and long-term benefits.

For employers there is no way out. Regulations require you to make an assessment of the risks your employees and other people are exposed to as result of your work. You can ask an employee or even a consultant to do the work for you, but remember that the employer remains responsible for making sure that the assessment is correctly drawn-up and applied.

Generic assessments that you can get from various organisations help, but they need adapting and applying to the work you actually carry out. Sorry to say this, but cut and paste will not do for many activities and tasks.

One of the most difficult questions to ask about risk management is: How much risk is acceptable in my work? While it would be ideal to eliminate completely all exposure to, say, hazardous chemicals, it is usually not possible or even feasible to remove all traces of a chemical once it has been released into the environment. In this particular instance, the aim of most regulators and therefore enforcers would be to reduce the health risks associated with exposure to hazardous pollutants to a negligibly low level.

At its simplest, and I would say the most practical, your assessment will show that you have identified whether you are complying with legal standards and best practice. And if you are not, to show what you are currently doing to improve and what else needs to be done and by when. The basic goals of your risk assessment should therefore be:

1. To review your accident scenarios and risk management arrangements for prevention, control and mitigation
2. To identify what good practice is relevant
3. To comply with relevant best practice and to examine whether there are other measures which would be effective in further reducing the risks
4. To implement the extra measures that are reasonably practicable.

Included in Sypol’s training, for example, are practical on-site exercises to assess various factors or tasks, the actual working arrangements, including the management of the risks and associated hazards. The benefits of this approach are:

1. The trainees experience the direct application of the training to their workplace and not theoretical scenarios and gain a full understanding of the risk and the assessment process on a personal and local basis.
2. The employer has formal written risk assessments performed on some of the risk areas and factors that are a concern, all supervised by a qualified trainer. So the task has been addressed, priority actions have been shared directly with the trained staff and a timescale for implementation of improvements agreed and understood by all concerned.

There are other benefits to this on-site approach to risk assessment training:

1. Benefits to the process of the management of site safety are tangible and can be seen by the entire workforce almost immediately
2. Documents required are produced straightaway
3. The employer shows by a practical demonstration, care for the workforce (and their representatives) not only to personal and corporate health, but also to their safety and welfare
4. Ongoing savings are achieved by using the in-house trained staff to maintain and update all assessments
5. No travel or hotel costs for staff
6. No hire costs for training equipment.

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