Risk assessment and management training will effectively teach the management team and employees how to conduct a risk assessment effectively. The UK Health and Safety Executive (HSE) has standards which they expect to be met with any risk assessment that is carried out. Training can inform each person in a workplace the steps involved within a risk assessment and the necessity behind these steps.
What is included in risk assessment and management training?
Training for risk assessment and management will focus on the purpose of risk assessments, which is essentially to identify hazards which exist within the workplace, how to implement control measures to protect against these hazards and how this can be maintained. The training will be focused upon the HSE’s five steps to conducting a risk assessment.
Initially, training will analyse how an employer can identify hazards properly. This has to be thorough and span across every aspect of the workplace, to ensure that no hazards go unnoticed. These hazards can come in many shapes and forms, and training will highlight each possible hazard which could exist in a workplace – for example physical hazards, biological hazards and chemical hazards.
Subsequently, a training programme will teach employers and employees how to assess the risk level which exists with the identified hazards. Risks will be evaluated across a spectrum, thus: high risk, medium risk or low risk. The risk which is associated with the identified hazard then needs to be taken into consideration to assess which individuals are most at risk. For example, if one of your employees is currently pregnant, they may be more at risk from certain hazards; if you have certain employees who deal with biological substances more so than other employees, then the employees dealing directly with substances need more consideration to protect them.
Following this, training will highlight to employers and employees what range of control measures are available to protect against hazards. It has been suggested that control measures are sometimes expensive or time consuming, or even difficult to implement, but this does not have to be the case. Control measures just ultimately need to protect individuals against the given hazard. For example, if there is a spillage on the floor which has created a wet surface, a wet floor sign to highlight to employees not to walk over this area in case they slip is an example of a control measure in its most simple form.
Training programmes will then explain how to appropriately document the risk assessment procedure. Documentation of each step conducted by the organisation in order to carry out the risk assessment must be produced. This documentation will then make it easier for an organisation to look back and review their previous risk assessments to help them make appropriate changes in the future. Moreover, if an incident does occur with your organisation which is investigated by the appropriate authorities, then documentation of risk assessments will be required to prove that you did take the necessary steps.
As touched upon above, the final part of a training procedure will be highlighting to employers and employees how to monitor risk assessments and review them to allow for changes to be implemented in the future. Naturally, a workplace will change over time as new employees are introduced and others leave. Therefore, a risk assessment will need to be updated in order to take into consideration and protect against these changes.
If your organisation wishes to comply with all health and safety laws and requirements, then training in risk assessment and management is of the utmost importance.
