Risk Assessment

[Just Some Bloke]

for all we know lanterns are raining constantly off the bars yet countless lives are saved by the secondary safeties...

 

I've worked in the business for 30 years now and never come across it myself or when speaking to others. Nevertheless I not only always use a safety myself, I always insist on my crew doing the same because if anything did happen then I'm sure someone would say "why didn't you use a safety".

 

My point here is that I'm not conformng to a Risk Assessment I did myself that said "blimey, those hook clamps don't look all that safe - better use a safety", I'm following a rule set by others that using a safety keeps you the right side of the line and not using one puts you the wrong side of the line. Thus there is a line and I know where it is. If I were asked to Risk Assess a production that used something I'd never come across before I'd feel justified in asking someone from HSE "where is the line drawn on this one?".

[gibbothegreat]

Something I find curious is that in fact a numerical value is exactly what is used to judge whether a risk is worth avoiding in other fields, particularly transport. I haven't seen up-to-date figures recently, but a wee while ago it was certainly the case that the threshold for road safety was around £100,000 per life saved - if it cost more than that it was deemed not worth spending. For rail, this was a vexed question around the early years of privatisation and the 'emotional' reponse to the disasters of those years (Ladbroke Grove, Hadfield) but after much wrangling they too settled on exactly this method of determing the worth of expenditure, albeit with a considerably higher threshold of about £1.4million IIRC

[Ynot]

Hmmm...

 

Surely the 'line' is flexible/mobile whatever...?

 

Using the 10kv example...

 

"Would I allow my son/daughter to climb a pylon and repair a 10kv HV line"

 

As my daughters are, the answer would be a firm 'NO' of course, as neither have had any training/experience in the work involved.

 

HOWEVER, if my eldest had, in a few years, taken training and supervised practice on maintenance of HV systems and was being employed to do just that, then my answer would be the opposite of course.

 

Therefore, the inimitable 'line' between what's safe and what's not is in a totally different place depending on who is being asked to do the job. And THAT is precisely where the dynamic risk assessment process (aka 'Common Sense') comes into play. As indeed it should.

 

Using JSB's other example of the age-old safety bond question then IN THEORY in a fixed grid, with no moving elements (eg tabs, fly bars etc) the risk associated with hanging a S4 lantern and keeping it fixed ad nauseam is pretty much negligible - the likelihood of that lantern EVER falling is as close to zero as you can contemplate. But I, like pretty much everyone else, will STILL pop a safety bond on there - if for no other reason than it's best practice to do so.

 

As I've said before, I've been doing risk assessment in a dynamic way for over 30 years. I've been writing paper RAs for maybe a third of that time.

Have I ever been any less safe in my working processes before I started keeping paperwork? I seriously doubt it. Other than improving methods as things changed over the years, I'd like to think I work in a proper and risk assessed and safe manner full stop.

 

 

[gibbothegreat]

For the safety geeks, interesting paper here about rail's approach to this

[indyld]

For the safety geeks, interesting paper here about rail's approach to this

 

Thanks for adding this. Very interesting on many fronts and important to look "outside" too, I feel.

 

Along with the risk management side of things, it's perhaps pertinent to attempt to mentally translate the concept of Willingness To Pay and the reduction of aggregated risk of fatality for payers into a situation more closely aligned with our business and the subject of recent discussion in other threads:

 

How does the WTP stack up with a paying audience that are not, as a rule, reducing the risk to themselves? Or with a risk "lower" than fatality.

(The question may be partly addressed in the paper, as many payers are not users)

 

What is the WTP when we are talking about the cost of going to see a show, whatever it took to make the "show go on"?

[gibbothegreat]

Something I find curious is that in fact a numerical value is exactly what is used to judge whether a risk is worth avoiding in other fields, particularly transport. I haven't seen up-to-date figures recently, but a wee while ago it was certainly the case that the threshold for road safety was around £100,000 per life saved - if it cost more than that it was deemed not worth spending. For rail, this was a vexed question around the early years of privatisation and the 'emotional' reponse to the disasters of those years (Ladbroke Grove, Hadfield) but after much wrangling they too settled on exactly this method of determing the worth of expenditure, albeit with a considerably higher threshold of about £1.4million IIRC

 

 

I should clarify that the road figure is the Dept of Transport's threshold, car manaufacturers spend a considerably greater sum to protect you...

 

What interests me about this is that the rail industry's adoption of this measure was after very publically killing passengers and getting excoriated for it by media and politicians alike, demanding their versions of 'absolute' safety. In the near nervous breakdown that ensued, it was eventually realised that 1) this would never be attainable, and 2) the only way to sensibly prioritise finite resources and funds was exactly to put a value on prevented casualties and injuries. Without that, all you really have is a subjective judgement...

[Scot628]

The article linked to in the OP is entitled "How safe is safe enough?" and I'd like to reiterate my point that there has to be a line beyond which is "safe enough" and, therefore, people are at liberty to ask where the line is.

 

I couldn't agree more. And Ms Hackitt might well be right in what she says (though she is being subjective where the one thing that is required is objectivity of course) but she should also, in IMHO, recognize just how much her predecessors at HSE sat back and allowed a whole panoply of regulation to be built up mostly piecemeal and largely unquestioned - because debate was not allowed or silenced with the riposte that any questioner must be against safety. For example one industry which I cover is now controlled by a 93 page guide when in the past common sense, an equipment testing regime, and professional expertise was considered enough. The ACOP addresses risks so statistically insignificant that few if any examples have ever been recorded yet puts in place strategies to prevent them! In the case of serious incidents the remedies at law are exactly the same as they have always been - with the addition of prosecution under HSWE 1974 of course - and as far as I can tell the accident rate in average terms has been the same for nearly 100 years.

 

Mmmm....can I give an alternative view (no riposte intended, promise!). Since 1992, as you all know, almost all legislation was driven by the European Directives. Nothing anyone in HSE could have done could have prevented this. I know for a fact there was an enormous amount of (mainly unsuccessful) work behind the scenes to try to avoid some of the more derided pieces of law that arrived on our shores and make other parts more complementary, but of course more can always be done and is currently being done to streamline and make more proportionate.

 

I hope no one with a point to be made was denied the chance to debate, but at some point those who want a debate run the risk of being marginalised if what was an argument to be made becomes more of a tirade against a perceived wrong? But, that said, no one should ever fight shy (and I know no one in BR does) of making a point when it needs to be made!

 

 

As to the industry governed by the 93 page guide - if its fairgrounds (and I say this only because HSG 175 comes in at a tidy 93 pages) then the average accident rate pre 1997 (when the guide came in) was pretty horrendous and culminated in in 5 deaths, 600 major accidents and a fairground examiner going to jail for manslaughter in season 2000/01. Common sense and professional expertise sadly lacking? In 2008/9, 10 years after the guide came in there were no fatals and under 80 major accidents and the rate had dropped almost every year since 2001, which to my mind is a pretty impressive decrease. What makes it more impressive was it was largely down to the industry: They wrote most of the current guidance, they set up the current systems, they worked with the HSE to develop the safety framework. Maybe the guide does deal with things that (fortunately) happen only rarely - but perhaps that is because people follow the guidance? Industry guidance blended with knowledge of the law works! Sorry, wandered off topic and if the reference wasn't to fairgrounds I can only humbly apologise for a mini rant.

 

Anyway, in relation to risk assessments - spot the bad things, do something about it, check to see it's enough and stop when it is. :)

[Seano]

....risks so statistically insignificant that few if any examples have ever been recorded yet puts in place strategies to prevent them!

 

<cough> tallescope </cough>

[kerry davies]

Now, now Seano, play nicely and count the incidents in outside industry as well.

 

Gibbo, those numerical figures are statistical tools not "real money" and DfT use between £750K and £1.45M for VPF since a road death in the PM's constituency is worth more than one in Teesside for socio-political reasons.

 

Just as NICE pay £30K a week for medication in some cases and won't pay £7k a week in others. Even in court VPF in recent at work fatalities has varied between £16K fines and £500K fines. Because we are discussing human lives the emotive, social and political elements have to play a part and always do.

 

That, I think, is where JH is trying to make her point. The line is never drawn at a fixed numerical point. It is all about care and not about cost.

 

For a fogey like me the criticism of HSE and ACOPS that regard "statistically insignificant examples" as worth mentioning reflects the irony that without the guides the stats would be, and indeed were, a hell of a lot worse.

Funny how one never notices a Not-An-Accident!

[Simon Lewis]

A liitle 'common sense safety poster' for your office walls:

 

I may be in a minority, but I'm not comfortable with the notion that health and safety is just common sense... It isn't common, otherwise we'd all do it and and it's not sense because many things we see lack the sound judgement you'd expect.

 

How many simple tasks (ladder work , manual handling etc.,) get done incorrectly but when we've shown how and why to do it properly it suddenly clicks and we do it right? If it were common sense that was needed, surely we'd work it out correctly the first time?

 

 

 

Simon

[Roderick]

What I find disappointing is that people are still looking for a 'line' to determine what is enough in a legal sense.

For me there is a very simple line: Can I sleep at night?

The target is to get to a point where I am happy that I have done everything humanly possible to prevent people from getting hurt. Sometimes that can cost money but more often than not it is simply a matter of looking at the task / equipment / needs and finding a better and safer way of doing it. Recognising the risk is 90% of the solution.

 

I am not sure what system is used in the UK but in Australia we use a very simple 5 x 5 matrix to determine the risk level.

You look at how likely it is something goes wrong and then how bad it gets if it does go wrong.

And then you list the options of reducing either the likelihood or the severity.

 

Very simple example: riggers working overhead with the risk they drop a shackle. It is fairly possible (and I am not taking pot shots here) and if that shackle hit someone 12 metres lower it will hurt, badly.

Now you could suggest that everyone wears a hard hat until the riggers overhead are finished. But then you have to supply these hard hats, maintain them, keep them clean so you don't start spreading head lice, etc. And I am not totally convinced about the effectiveness of a hard hat and a 3tonne shackle in a 12 metre drop.

My simple solution? Take 4 motorcases and a roll of hazard tape and mark out an area of roughly 4 x 4 metre under the rigger working overhead making it an exclusion zone. If there are no people in the risk area they can't get hurt.

And yes, I do recognise that there will be ground riggers who will need to be inside that exclusion zone but they are in a totally different position. A ground rigger will normally be in eye contact with the work overhead and would notice something falling and step aside.

 

Let's worry less about what a magistrate would say, let's focus on avoiding standing there in the first place.

[ramdram]

Steady on Rod'k...you are talking far too much sense here. WE are talking about normal people...who don't possess UNcommon sense.

 

The number of folk in my venue who know I'm up a ladder (because they say "Hi" whilst staring at you) yet still wander about in the drop zone of gel frames, safety bonds or even AJs would make you weep.

 

These folk, who might have what you might call "brainy" jobs...doctors, solicitors, accountants etc etc have absolutely NO conception of the law of gravity and blithely sort things in time for the show regardless cannot own one iota of self preservation whatsoever...which is why we ended up with H&S in the first place.

 

The H&S is mainly for people who don't make the "connection".

[kerry davies]

I may be in a minority, but I'm not comfortable with the notion that health and safety is just common sense..

One of my favourite sayings is; "There is nothing common about common sense, it is rarer than rocking horse sh1t".

 

I am glad I started this thread because it confirms my view that despite differences in expressing the principles most people here really do care which is all HASAWA 1974 asks of us; "A duty of care to yourself and those around you."

[Just Some Bloke]

One of the things Derren Brown (sorry for dragging him into this! :)) points out in one of his books is this: imagine you dial a wrong number by mistake on your phone and it just happens that the number turns out to be an acquaintance's private number which you didn't know. Imagine your surprise when (s)he answers. What are the chances of that? Let's assume they are 10 million to one. Well, there are more than 50 million people in the UK alone and each of them will make thousands of phone calls over their lives, so it is statistically likely that this WILL happen to a dozen or so people in the UK alone at some time in their lives.

 

So if the chances of a hook clamp failing are 100,000 to 1 and there are 10,000 people using hook clamps regularly in the UK then statistically it is likely that at least one person WILL experience a failing hook clamp. The chances of this happening are much smaller than the chances of someone scalding themselves when brewing up, but when it comes to court and the barrister says "does everyone but you use a safety?" and you agree they do then no amount of saying "but there's no need because it's so unlikely to happen" will help. There was a line drawn in the sand and you didn't cross it.

 

I agree with almost everyone in this thread: we can all work out the risks if we concentrate hard enough and/or do the research, but at the end of the day if the line has been drawn then you will be expected to stick to it or suffer the consequences in court. It may not be right or make sense but it IS the case.

[accessoperator]

A little 'common sense safety poster' for your office walls:

 

I may be in a minority, but I'm not comfortable with the notion that health and safety is just common sense... It isn't common...

Simon

 

This will depend on your own interperatation of the phrase 'common sense':

 

Dictionary Definition: Com-mon Sense (Good sense and sound judgment in practical matters)

 

People often see 'Common Sense' as an unconcious 'Instinct' we are all born with. If that were the case there would be no need for the HSE, Safety Officers or this discussion.

 

To me 'Common Sense' is born from each individuals 'Personal Experience or Knowledge'. If they have 'NO' Personal Experience or knowledge in a given field, task or danger then they will have no 'common sense'. An infant does not have the 'common sense' to keep themselves from danger. It has to be taught & learned.

 

Health & Safety Legislation may seem to be incomprehensible jargon to many & quickly skipped over, but once you've read it & understood it, it is all about 'Common Sense'. Legislation is very much open to individual interperatation (just like this post) & often results in one person's opinion being challanged by another's.

 

This can result in two extremes, the first going way over the top or the other not quite far enough. Both will be as a result of NOT having the 'Personal Experience or knowledge' to make a 'sound judgement in practical matters'!

 

The person or assessor who can demonstrate the most 'personal experience & knowledge' will always be the one with the most 'common sense' & one who will ultimatly not 'over' or 'under' indulge personal safety.

 

The opening line in the poster starts with... "When sense is not that common," Try substituting the word 'sense' for 'Personal Experience & Knowledge' . It doesn't make good poetry... but the penny might drop!