Hazard identification

A hazard is something with a potential for causing harm in terms of injury or ill
health. Hazard identification should aim to determine proactively all sources,
situations or acts (or a combination of them), arising from an organization’s
activities, with a potential for harm in terms of injury or ill health. Examples
include:
i. sources (eg moving parts in machinery, radiation or hazardous
substances)
ii. situations (eg working in confined spaces, working at height)
iii. acts (eg manual handling, driving a forklift truck).
The Institute of Occupational Safety and Health publication Health and Safety:
Risk Management suggests that hazard identification should follow the following
steps.
❖ Prepare an inventory of all sources of hazards, including methods of work,
materials and substances, plant and equipment, the work organization, place of
work and the working environment.
❖ Identify hazards for each item in the inventory.

❖ Review the inventory regularly and keep it up to date.

Looking for hazards involves identifying what has the “potential to cause harm”. It
is a logical conclusion that if there are no hazards, there can be no risks. This is the
key factor in risk management, as the prime control measure is to remove the
hazard at source wherever possible. Typical preliminary lists of potential hazards
might include the following items.
Preliminary List of Potential Hazards
Certain hazards, including manual handling, electricity and electrical equipment,
fire, hazardous substances and slips, trips and falls, can be added to the preliminary
list for virtually all workplaces, tasks and activities.
Specific hazards, such as display screen equipment, machinery, noise, welding,
compressed air, lift truck operation, traffic movements and falling objects, can be
added to the generic risks. Such an approach will help ensure all significant
hazards have been identified.
Observation of workplaces and activities is an important part of hazard
identification, but it has limitations. Some hazards, such as non-visible radiation,
odourless vapours, micro-organisms, etc are not directly perceptible, and even
when they are, often a certain level of knowledge is required for them to be
identified as hazards. It should be remembered that sources include human factors
such as psychosocial hazards (eg threat of physical violence, bullying or
intimidation) and human behaviour and capabilities. The assessment should look at
whether non-routine operations (eg maintenance, cleaning operations or changes in
production cycles) present any hazards.
Identify Who is at Risk
Having identified the hazards, it is necessary to identify who is at risk. It is not
necessary to identify individuals by name, rather by group, eg:
❖ office workers (including any who are home-based or predominantly mobile, eg
sales representatives) ❖ reception staff

❖ production workers

❖ assembly line workers

❖ maintenance staff

❖ cleaning staff

❖ security staff

❖ building contractors

❖ engineering contractors

❖ catering contractors

❖ drivers and delivery staff

❖ warehouse staff

❖ visitors

❖ general public.
Particular attention needs to be given to vulnerable people, eg young workers, new
and expectant mothers or disabled people. Additional controls may be required to
reduce the risk to an acceptable level for such employees.
Determine the Harm
Having identified the hazards and those exposed to them, it is necessary to
determine the likely harm: the type of injuries and their potential seriousness that
could result from a hazard.
Evaluate the Risks
i. Preliminary risk assessment
It is worth carrying out an initial, informal risk assessment to determine the level of
detail that will be required in a full risk assessment.
In general, insignificant risks can be ignored, along with risks arising from routine
activities associated with life in general, unless the work either compounds or
significantly alters the risk. The purpose of a preliminary assessment is to
determine which work activities involve a significant risk of injury and warrant a
full assessment.

ii. Generic risk assessment

Generic risk assessments (GRAs) are model assessments designed to cover
activities that are repetitive and consistent in application for organisations. They
can improve the speed and efficiency of the risk assessment process and impact the
consistency of risk assessments for similar tasks.
GRAs are acceptable if all the workplaces and tasks they apply to are very similar.
However, this approach should be used with caution as no two workplaces or
situations in which a task is undertaken are the same. GRAs should never be
adopted without thinking of how relevant they are to the exact circumstances under
consideration. They should be reviewed before use and any necessary
modifications made to ensure they are suitable and sufficient for the situation for
which they are to be used.
iii. Qualitative Risk assessments
Where the hazards presented by the undertaking are few or simple, as will be the
case in many small businesses, it is appropriate to just carry out a simple
qualitative risk assessment. This can be a very straightforward process based on
informed, but subjective, judgement and reference to appropriate guidance.
Consideration should be given to whether the procedures and safe working
practices that are already in place adequately control the risk and meet applicable
standards and guidance.
Risk rating techniques operate on using the likelihood (of the hazard occurring)
and the severity (of the loss) to give the magnitude of the risk.
In qualitative risk assessments this calculation is implied in the assessor’s
subjective judgment of whether the risk is high, medium or low. Quantitative
systems ascribe numbers to levels of likelihood and severity to decide a final risk
rating.
The following points are usually adopted when calculating likelihood and severity.
❖ Likelihood:

✓ high — where it is certain, or near certain, harm will occur

✓ medium — where harm will often occur

✓ low — where harm will seldom occur.

❖ Severity:

✓ major — death, or major injury or illness, causing long-term disability

✓ serious — injuries or illness causing short-term disability

✓ slight — all other injuries or illness.

Such an approach can be used as part of a risk level estimator system. The
following is suggested by the British Standards Institution’s publication Guide to
Occupational Health and Safety Management Systems.
It should be noted that the use of “low risk”, “very high risk”, etc in the estimator
is a perception of risk, rather than an exact measurement of risk. More
sophisticated systems ascribe numbers and levels of probability to likelihood and
severity to decide a final risk rating. The risk assessment should only include what
could reasonably be expected to be known. Assessors are not expected to anticipate
unforeseeable risks.
iv. Semi-quantitative assessments
In intermediate cases, such as those involving medium-sized undertakings dealing
with more complex risks, the risk assessments will need to be more sophisticated.
Specialist advice may be needed and analytical techniques relating to monitoring
may need to be considered.
Often semi-quantitative processes, where scoring schemes are ascribed to
likelihood and potential severity along with guide words to aid the assessor’s
subjective judgment in scoring, are used. While these techniques limit the range of
the assessor’s subjective input, they are not fully objective, as a judgment still has
to be made with regard to scoring for likelihood and severity and this may need the
input of other data and professional opinions.
This may need the input of other data and professional opinions and analytical
techniques relating to monitoring. There are a number of variants to the broad
systems of risk quantification. This model would result in an overall risk rating
ranging from 0 to 25. The following is a simple example using this system.