Risk assessment - guidance

Completing a risk assessment on a task, a chemical or location can be a daunting prospect. To make things simpler, use our guidance document that identifies which document to use and helps you through the process.

Important job

If you read almost any piece of health and safety legislation, it won’t take you long to find the duty to assess the risks. Be it machinery, chemicals, locations, processes or manual handling tasks you must identify what could put staff and others at risk and what control measures should be applied to make it safe. Plus, if you have five or more staff, you must record your findings.

Standard documents

Our suite of risk assessment documents can be used to record the findings of your assessments. To help you identify when and how to use them we have produced a single document, Risk Assessment - Guidance.

Which ones?

Our guidance identifies covers the following documents:

• risk assessment - blank
• risk assessment - audit
• display screen equipment - workstation assessment
• risk assessment - COSHH DSEAR
• risk assessment - site specific
• detailed assessment - lifting and carrying
• risk assessment - machinery.

What to do?

Our document includes three columns. In the “Description of the document” you’ll find just that. For example, in the “Risk assessment - blank” column it says: “Under the Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations 1999 all employers are required to carry out risk assessments of all work activities conducted by its employees. To complete the process, use the Risk Assessment - master document.”

In the third column “Instructions” you’ll find the most useful information. Here we go into detail regarding how the each of the columns of the form work, what sort of information to include and more. We have even included instructions on how to calculate levels of risk. In short, it includes all the information you need to guide you through the process.