Finale
What have we learned?
My key point for you to take away from this book is that while the “five steps” approach is a useful overview, if you design your risk management processes around five linear steps with a feedback loop every year or so, you won’t identify all reasonably foreseeable hazards, nor will you control hazards so far as is reasonably practicable. In other words, people will be unnecessarily harmed, and your organisation could end up in court.
Part one
Part one (chapters 1 to 4) provided suggestions on how to interpret the law over what hazards are trivial or “fantastic probabilities” and which are reasonable probabilities. Sometimes, even if it seems fantastic – like a Space Shuttle landing on a public building in London – we should still make some “reasonable” preparations. We also looked at how to make it less likely we left some people out of our consideration. Some people are more vulnerable, and often, by thinking of them, we make a system that is better for everyone.
Part two
Part two looked at the iterative process of assessing and controlling (steps 2 and 3). Since a book has a linear structure (even with the hyperlinks in the online version) this is a compromise. Every chapter assumes an assessment dimension. It’s why the whole process is called ‘risk assessment’ not just the second (third if you’re old school) step. I spent a lot of time trying to persuade you not to use scoring systems, but instead to be clear about the different outcomes you were thinking of. There’s probably another book in considering how to determine what is enough. But if you have a clear, reasoned process, if the worst happens and someone is harmed, you are in a stronger position to defend why you thought it was enough.
Part three
I bundled the documenting (step 4), monitoring and reviewing (step 5) into Part three, because how you document the significant findings of your risk assessment affects how you review and monitor. This isn’t about how you label the columns in a risk assessment table – it’s about the wider systems and other documents you use to make sure that people are competent and that equipment is properly maintained. And how you check whether what you think is happening is actually happening.
As with assessment, review is not a period process, but needs to be part of every step. Are we identifying and describing hazards adequately? Are our assessments meaningful? Can we make our controls more effective (and more cost-effective)? Even the review and monitoring processes need to be reviewed to make sure they are working.
Conclusion
This book is not an argument for more paperwork, more complexity or endless re-assessment. It is a practical guide for “suitable and sufficient” risk assessments. You now have tools for identifying hazards within tasks, for thinking clearly about the people who might be harmed, for choosing and improving controls, and for verifying that those controls work in practice.
The law does not require perfection, or hundreds of pages of calculations. It requires attention, judgement and an approach you can explain.
I hope that this book has helped you to re-design your risk assessment processes to fit in with how work is done, and to adapt as conditions change.
This book has served its purpose if you now have the confidence to guide your organisation in taking responsibility for risk judgements, seeing risk assessment not as a box-ticking, form-filling task, but as a practical, live management process.
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Appendix 1: Case studies by year
Appendix 2: Answers to questons posed in each chapter
Appendix 3: Lost HSE references