You need a robust Health and Safety Risk Assessment Form for your team to document observations on a risk assessment. A complete facility or departmental risk assessment might find multiple risks, so you need a template that can handle the workload. That’s where our free and downloadable template comes into play.

What Is Health And Safety Risk Assessment?

A Health and Safety Risk Assessment Form is a form used to compile observational information regarding the hazards and potential hazards found during a safety inspection. Unlike a single occurrence risk assessment form, the Health and Safety Risk Assessment Form for you can handle most complete inspections.

Whether you are completing an internal inspection, assessment of current operations, or a new process safety assessment, you’ll need to document those observations. However, it’s not enough to merely grab a paper and run, so we’re going to provide full instructions on how to utilize best the template we’ve provided. 

We’ll even include some tips at the end to help you make a more efficient safety assessment process, so stick around. Let’s start with what we have included in the H & S template.

Included In The Health And Safety Risk Assessment Form

What to include in a health and safety risk assessment? Not to worry, we’ve got that covered. Basically, it would be best to have a reasonable risk assessment to show your due diligence towards maintaining safe operations. But we’ll get to more of the requirements later in the article.

The downloadable Health and Safety Risk Assessment Form has four primary segments that comprise the bulk of the document. The four segments are described below.

Administrative Segment

Every form of inspection template must have an administrative section. This section of the document notes the document creator, the company or client, the location, and the date and time of the assessment. Similarly, we’ve also included a handy spot to note the next required assessment date.

Health And Safety Risk Observations

The bulk of the Health and Safety Risk Assessment Form body comprises two sections. One of these sections is the Health and Safety Risk Observations matrix. This matrix allows for several critical pieces of information recordable on the document:

• Hazard number (identifier)
• Hazard location or process information
• The hazard type
• The consequences of an unmitigated hazard.
• Probability of the danger resulting in an incident
• The overall risk rating is determined by the consequences referencing the probability.

Associated Hazard Control Measures Recommendations

Identifying the hazard and characteristics is only one part of a proper and complete Health and Safety Risk Assessment. The flip side to this coin is the completion of hazard controls, prevention, and mitigation recommendations. These vital recommendations complete the process by offering corrective actions to resolve the hazards.

Most incidents are preventable. According to EHS Today, 99% of accidents are preventable. That means that if you complete a proper risk assessment, document the findings with recommendations, and act on those recommendations, you have a high chance of preventing foreseeable accidents at your facility.

Notes

No inspection is complete without a notes section. There will always be something that a safety and risk assessor will want to note that space does not provide for in the document above. So, to solve this issue, we’ve left a decent spot for your assessor to compile any further notes following their safety and risk assessment.

If you’re looking for a Risk Assessment Form for general risk documentation, take a look at our general Risk Assessment Form here.

How To Use The Health And Safety Risk Assessment Form

How Do You Write A Health Risk Assessment?

When completing a health and safety risk assessment, including all hazards in your review is essential. The health and safety risk assessment form provides a space to document the threat, location, type of hazard, consequences of an unmitigated hazard, and associated hazard control measures recommendations.

Completing this form will help you identify all hazards, and that necessary controls are put into place to mitigate any potential incidents.

3 Best Practices For Writing Risk Assessments Using The Health And Safety Risk Assessment Form

• use non-judgemental language
• only document visible, quantitative, and qualitative observations
• never include feelings or assumptions

What Are The 4 Elements Of A Risk Assessment?

There are four critical elements to a health and safety risk assessment:

– Identification of Hazards

Identifying hazards is critical to managing risk within the workplace. Once hazards have been identified, health and safety professionals should assess the level of risk associated with those hazards. Risk assessment is an excellent way to communicate health and safety information to all employees within an organization or business.

– Identification of Risk or Risks Associated with the Hazards

Once health and safety professionals determine the risk associated with a hazard, they will need to assess whether employees or guests are at risk. Health and safety professionals should be aware that there could be low levels of risk that are not elevated simply because no employees perform tasks related to those hazards or because exposures are infrequent.

– Determination of the Severity of these Risks

It refers to the health impacts a hazard may have on employees. For example, health and safety professionals should determine whether health effects from exposure to danger might be severe and potentially life-threatening. If health and safety professionals determine a severe effect, they must include it in their risk assessment process. That inclusion should be documented on a proper Health And Safety Risk Assessment Form.

– Creation and Implementation of Control Measures to Mitigate the Risks Identified.

Health and safety professionals need to identify what controls can be implemented to eliminate risks from being realized. In other words, how can you control a hazard? For example, you discover that specific equipment has a fault that could cause harm to a team member if one does not repair it immediately. 

The health and safety professional exercises due diligence by finding out who’s responsible for getting repairs done quickly. They also work to get them the necessary approval to fix the problem, communicating the issue with the affected staff.

Corrective Actions

Corrective actions are vital to the risk assessment process. It is the final stage of the process that calls for change. That is, it calls for hazard mitigation via a planned strategy based on the observations and information recorded during the risk assessment process – and one should not overlook them.

Here are five tips for a more efficient corrective action process:

1. Identify who would be best suited to perform the corrective action.
2. Plan the corrective action with safety as the primary concern.
3. Designate the correction plan for an individual to take responsibility.
4. Assign a timeline and deadline for the corrective action process.
5. Notify everyone involved of the planned corrective measures.

Let’s look at some of the different types of risk assessments to understand how we can use them to our advantage.

What Are The Types Of Risk Assessment?

Types of Risk Assessments include the following:

Regulatory Risk Assessment

Regulatory risk assessments are health and safety risk assessments completed for specific health and safety regulations. Inspectors use regulatory risk assessments to identify health hazards, determine their level of risk, and implement controls to reduce or eliminate any health risks identified.

Hazards are existing workplace health hazards that can cause harm if particular actions are not taken. For example, chemicals used in a manufacturing plant can be hazardous if mishandled during transportation, storage, use, spillage, or disposal. In this case, likely, there would already be health and safety legislation in place that pertains specifically to the health hazard chemical that the inspector would check against during their inspection.  

Internal Health And Safety Risk Assessment (Self-Declaration)

The health and safety officer or health and safety manager completes this health and safety risk assessment to ensure health risks are identified, assessed, and mitigated. This process can also be known as internal.  

Assessment of an External Assessor

If your business contracts out health and safety management services to third-party health & safety consultants or other professionals, it’s likely that there will be times when you need to audit their work before handing over the reins back to you. It could also be the case that another business might request proof of your audits when you’re looking for tenders.  

Your health and safety provider tells you that health risks have been identified, and controls have been put in place to help control those risks from being realized. In this case, auditing the health & safety assessment would mean looking back on their work for accuracy, checking they didn’t miss anything.

5 Tips For Successful Risk Assessments At Work

Health and safety personnel often ask us questions about best running their health and safety inspections. So, we’ve compiled some of the most common questions. And we’ve answered them in the form of quick, actionable tips you can use to solve some of your risk assessment issues.

How Do I Make A Risk Assessment Form?

You can use our downloadable template instead of making your risk assessment form. We also have a single risk assessment item form that provides a more in-depth response for a single hazard type assessment. You can find this form and the single hazard assessment form within our massive downloadable template library.

However, if making a risk assessment form custom to your purposes is the goal, you can easily create a mobile digital form customized for your business. How to make this form, you ask? The easiest way is to use the 1st Reporting app – a mobile form automation application you can use on iOS and Android devices and access via your desktop or laptop.

Who Can Prepare A Risk Assessment?

Generally speaking, a competent appointed individual must be responsible for completing a risk assessment. This competency would typically include education and training in appropriate fields and a complete understanding of the risks in the assessed workplace environment.

What Is Risk Calculation Formula?

According to Roberto Pinto of the University of Bergamo (via Researchgate):

“The formulation “risk = probability (of a disruption event) x loss (connected to the event occurrence)” is a measure of the expected loss connected with something (i.e., a process, a production activity, an investment…) subject to the occurrence of the considered disruption event. It is a way to quantify risks.”

In simple terms, the risk calculation formula is:

risk = probability x loss

What Is The Legal Requirement For Risk Assessments?

Most countries hold laws that state that you must complete a risk assessment (conducted by anyone running a business). Whether utilizing staff or contractors, there is a risk if humans are involved. Thus, you must complete an assessment.

The legal requirements for the specific assessments differ from country to country and industry to industry. However, we can generally state that common sense is usually behind any legal requirements for risk assessments. These laws would be similar in most established countries.

For example, in the United Kingdom, the Health and Safety Executive has this to say about the legal obligations of businesses and organizations when it comes to assessing workplace risks:

“Under the Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations 1999, the minimum you must do is:

• identify what could cause injury or illness in your business (hazards)
• decide how likely it is that hazards could harm someone and how seriously (the risk)
• take action to eliminate the hazard, or if this isn’t possible, control the risk

Assessing risk is just one part of the overall process used to control risks in your workplace.”

Similarly to the HSE in the UK, the OSHA has this to say within their legislation for workplaces where PPE may (or may not) be required:

“1910.132(d)(1)The employer shall assess the workplace to determine if hazards are present or are likely to be present, which necessitate the use of personal protective equipment (PPE). If such hazards are present or likely to be present, the employer shall:

1910.132(d)(1)(ii)

Communicate selection decisions to each affected team member; and,

1910.132(d)(1)(iii)

Select PPE that properly fits each affected team member.”

Taking these regulations of the OSHA literally means that every employer, for every role and process, must perform a risk assessment. After all, you cannot determine PPE is NOT a requirement without performing an initial evaluation.

Authorities do not go around dropping fines on every single business that didn’t do a hazard assessment for employees to use a stapler or a pen. But technically, if they wanted to throw the book at a company, these regulations could open the door for trouble. Having a concise health and safety manual that identifies as many potential hazards as possible doesn’t look like such a bad idea, now does it?

How Can I Make My Risk Assessments More Efficient?

By far, the most efficient means of efficiently completing risk assessments is by reporting or inspecting apps like 1st Reporting.

Are you tired of spending hours on tedious paperwork?

You can now automate your daily vehicle inspections, Covid declarations, and more with the 1st Reporting App. It’s a mobile form automation application that allows users to:

– report various incidents

– complete inspections

– automate notifications

– include GPS

– include audio, video, or images in their reports

–  and so much more 

The app is cloud-based and secure, so you know your data is kept safe and accessible from anywhere you can connect to the internet.

With just one click of a button, you can have all your information submitted for review by management without having to spend hours typing up reports. This app saves time for everyone involved – including yourself! You won’t find another solution on the market today that provides an easy way to make reporting more manageable than ever before! Try it out today!

Sign up for a free trial of the 1st Reporting App right now!