How risky is the activity or event? And how likely is it that the worst will happen?
Now that we know that sometimes risk assessments need to be written down to show that we’ve thought about it, it is time to focus on two key questions.
How risky is the activity or event? The best way that I’ve found over the years is to assess the risk using a sliding scale from no injury up to a fatality. I can almost hear you thinking that using the word fatality is a bit extreme, but remember that we’re not saying what will happen but what the worst thing that can happen is.
Taking the examples from my previous posts on risk assessments, let’s look first at the idea of being burnt in the kitchen. A judgement of no injury is not a likely worst-case scenario, equally a judgement of a fatality is also not likely. So how do we assess the risk? It’s definitely likely to cause a minor injury, whilst being unlikely to cause a major injury (the most likely being you burn your hand and instantly drop the hot tray) I would judge that the level of risk is towards the lower end of the scale. Alternatively, if you consider the risks of crossing the road, it is perfectly possible for a fatality to occur if you misjudged checking that the road was clear before setting out. This is then considered a high risk.
The second aspect of risk assessments is a very important one. How likely is the worst-case scenario to happen? The answer to this question can balance out the level of risk decided upon in the basic assessment. Again I use a sliding scale from being a remote chance of the worst-case happening to a definite or certain chance of it happening.
Whilst crossing the road is considered a high risk situation, it is very unlikely that it would cause a fatality. Using a score based system we can get an overall score for the activity before putting in place strategies to reduce the risk. Once those strategies are listed, the level of risk is then reassessed until the level of risk is low or medium.
Getting burnt in the kitchen is a medium level of risk, and it has an equal weight of likely to happen. Therefore, it is considered a medium risk. We would still put strategies in place to lower the risk level (over gloves, careful supervision etc.) but we would not need to be as detailed as the previous example.
In my next post I will start to explain how and why we put risk assessments in place specifically for those working with children or in the Performing Arts area.
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