Risk Management in Occupational Health and Safety

Risk management, or the process of seeking out and minimising or eliminating risks is beneficial to businesses for many reasons:

• Minimising injury and disease
• Reducing financial loss, including Workers Compensation premiums
• Maintaining productivity levels
• Minimising Litigation
• Good corporate citizenship
• Maintaining the assets of the business including people, plant, property and product.

When we talk about risk management in the context of occupational health and safety, we are referring to the legal requirement to identify and assess foreseeable risks, to take action to eliminate or control them, and to review our actions to determine our success in managing the risk.

It makes good business sense to reduce areas of loss such as employee absence due to work-related injury or illness, and associated workers compensation premium costs.

The initial step in occupational health and safety risk management is the identification and documentation of hazards. Examples of hazards include unguarded machinery, excessive noise, poor lighting, cramped work postures, trip hazards, heights, manual lifting, machinery.

Methods used to identify hazards include:

• Hazard reporting procedures
• Review of injury and illness records
• Workplace inspections
• External Audits
• Task analysis
• Consultation, complaints, communications
• Specific risk assessments on confined spaces, hazardous substances, manual handling activities, plant, machinery.

Once identified, it is important to assess the risk level of the hazard. Risk assessment takes into account:

• potential severity of an outcome such as fatality, injury or illness
• likelihood or probability of an event occurring in the existing circumstances, including the frequency and duration of exposure to the hazard
• number of people affected
• Human differences of the workforce
• any other relevant factors

Analysing the level of risk helps in understanding how a hazard might be eliminated or controlled. This process also allows a subjective quantification of risk level which is useful in prioritizing risks, for example High, Medium and Low.

Control measures must then be determined and implemented. The "Hierarchy of Hazard Control" is useful here as it identifies a sequence to work through:

• Elimination of the Hazard
• Substitution
• Isolation
• Engineering Controls
• Administrative Controls
• Personal Protective Equipment

Review of the risk management process is essential as it helps to verify whether actions taken to eliminate or control risk have been effective.

For assistance with managing your workplace risk please contact Safety Services Australia