Biology safety. Risk assessments

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Risk assessments

Useful information

Legal requirements

List of Departmental Generic assessments

Departmental Special assessments

There is no doubt that we work with a wide range of hazards in the department. Can we work safely with them? What is the risk posed by them?
Let's start off by getting these terms sorted out.

What do "hazard", "risk" and "safe" actually mean?
Hazard is the potential to cause harm (that means anything that can cause harm (e.g. toxic chemicals, radiation, pathogenic biological agents, electricity, working from ladders, etc.)). The hazard is couched in terms of "toxic", "carcinogenic", "pathogenic" etc.. You can determine the hazard of a chemical from its data sheet or the label on the bottle. For example, sodium cyanide is toxic.
Risk on the other hand is the likelihood of harm (in defined circumstances, and usually qualified by some statement of the severity of the harm). Straightforward risks can be expressed simply as "low" or "high", more complicated ones may need to be expressed numerically as a combination of severity of consequence and probability. A data sheet cannot tell you the risk as that depends on how you use the hazard. For example, working with 1ml of a buffered solution of sodium cyanide at pH 9 is "relatively safe".
The relationship between hazard and risk must be treated very cautiously. If all other factors are equal - especially the exposures and the people subject to them, then the risk is proportional to the hazard. However all other factors are very rarely equal.
If you are experienced (or well-informed, trained and/or supervised) in handling something very hazardous then it is possible to work safely with it. It is also possible to be harmed by something that is usually regarded as "safe". In this context "safe" doesn't mean "risk-free".
As risk is dependent on the competency of the person performing the work we have adopted a simple procedure for determining, and recording, the supervision levels of individual workers. In departmental work areas there is a yellow ring binder which contains paper copies of the risk assessments. At the front of each one there is a Supervision Record to record details of personnel carrying out the work outlined in each assessment. These supervision records must be completed.

What is risk assessment? A risk assessment is nothing more than a careful examination of what, in your work, could cause harm to people, so that you can weigh up whether you have taken enough precautions or should do more to prevent harm. The aim is to make sure that no one gets hurt or becomes ill. The assessment must cover reasonably foreseeable situations, and these include chemical spills, waste disposal and emergency procedures.

Why does it need to be done? Accidents and ill health can ruin lives, and affect your work too if fire causes significant damage, machinery is out of action or you have to go to court. As a university department we have a clear moral responsibility to protect our members from harm caused as a result of working or studying here. We must inform our members of the hazards and risks posed by their work or studies. Departmental managers are legally required to assess the risks in our workplace. The HSE has produced "A Guide to Risk Assessment Requirements. Common provisions in health and safety law " at http://www.hse.gov.uk/pubns/indg218.pdf. There are several sets of legislation where risk assessment is required, the reason is to minimise injury to people. Our assessments attempt to deal with all hazards of the work activities and so we tend not to refer to them as "COSHH assessments" or "manual handling assessments" (although we do have generic assessments covering these aspects) but rather as work activity risk assessments..

Who must do it? "The employer" must assess the risks of his work before it takes place. In our situation that means supervisors (academic staff, postdoctoral researchers, senior technical and administrative staff) need to do it. We have a number of generic assessments drafted to cover the majority of work performed in the department. Anyone can draft a "special" assessment, indeed it should be carried out by someone familiar with the protocol, but it needs to be accepted by a supervisor before being checked and adopted by the departmental safety coordinator and Head of department.

What needs to be done?
Adopt the generic assessments produced within the department. Refer to the additional infomation we have provided for lab workers.
For risks not covered by these then a special assessment may need to be drafted. Before you do that please follow the scheme outlined in our special assessments page.

The special assessment should follow the five steps in the HSE leaflet ("Five steps to risk assessment" - http://www.hse.gov.uk/pubns/indg163.pdf):
STEP 1: Look for the hazards.
STEP 2: Decide who might be harmed and how.
STEP 3: Evaluate the risks and decide whether the existing precautions are adequate or whether more should be done.
STEP 4: Record the findings, make it available to all people performing the work and assign individual supervision levels.
STEP 5: Review the assessment regularly and revise it if necessary (for instance, in the light of an incident, new hazard data becoming available or the change of a chemical exposure standard).

The important things to decide are;

whether a hazard is significant,
what are the reasonably foreseeable circumstances which should be considered,
whether the risk of working with it is minimized by using appropriate and available precautions and
whether the remaining risk is acceptable.

For instance, electricity can kill but the risk of it doing so in an office environment is remote, provided that ‘live’ components are insulated and metal casings properly earthed.

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