If you have seen our previous blogs / videos on risk assessment you will know how to identify hazards in your workplace and will know how to determine the risk of each hazards. Now its time to apply control measures to lower the risk of each hazard.
But picking control measures is not quite as simple as just choosing some things, that you think may possibly help keep people safe and as with everything in health and safety, there are process we much follow and laws we must abide by!
When applying control measures we must legally follow something called the principles of prevention, which are outlined in the management of health and safety at work regulations and this means. The principles of prevention essentially say that we have to consider control measures in this particular order:
Eliminating the hazard entirely
The first set of control measures we need to consider as part of our risk assessment is the controls that eliminate the hazard entirely. There are many examples of where we can eliminate hazards in the workplace. An example that is often used is cleaning windows. Back in the day, window cleaners would climb a ladder to clean your windows, which presented a fall from height hazard. Now days they use a pole to clean your windows and the fall from height hazard has been eliminated.
Other examples include using conveyor belts to eliminate the need for manual handling and using a tile cutter instead of a grinder to eliminate dust and noise among countless other hazards.
One thing you should note, is that eliminating one hazard often brings in other hazards. So if you use a conveyor belt instead of manual handling, you are introducing hazards such as electricity and moving machinery. If you are introducing hazards that pose a greater risk than the hazard you have eliminated, you maybe need to re-consider.
If you can eliminate a hazard, that’s excellent you don’t have to do anything else. However, eliminating hazards is not always possible or practical and in these cases, we need to go to the next stage of the principles of prevention.
Substituting the hazard with something less hazardous
Substitution measures replace the hazard with a different hazard of a lower risk or find a compromise in your elimination measure to make them more practical. For example, if you’re your task involves painting and you are planning on using lead-based paint (even though you would struggle to get hold of it nowadays), you could swap this for solvent or better yet water-based paint, as these pose a lower risk to people doing the painting.
Similarly, you could look at the method of applying the paint. If you are spraying paint, you increase the risk of inhaling, ingesting or getting paint in your eyes or on your skin. Whereas the chances of this are much lower if you apply the paint using a brush or a roller.
Looking at the equipment you are using, generally provides some good opportunities for substitution control measures. You don’t always need the biggest digger available to do a job and a smaller digger will be able to do the same job with a lower risk. Chainsaws can be swapped out for reciprocating saws, breakers can be swapped out for newer breakers with antivibration functionality etc.
Substitution measures are great, however again they are not always possible or practical. Similarly, since you have not entirely eliminated the risk you need to continue to the next stage of the principles of prevention to lower the risk further.
Putting a physical barrier between you and the hazard–engineering controls
We see engineering controls a lot in the workplace, from guarding around moving parts of machines to handrails on stairs to welding screens, Local exhaust ventilation, and dust suppression. The list is endless and includes anything that acts as a physical barrier to stop you from interacting with or being harmed by a hazard.
Administrative controls
Administrative controls are the rules we set out, our checks, our methods of monitoring and generally the information, instruction and training we give to people who may be affected by the hazard.
In the workplace, we have things like policies, procedures, and safe systems of working to communicate rules and expectations to keep people safe. We provide training to employees, so they know how to work safely and provide induction, toolbox talks, noticeboards and signage to reinforce this training. We also have documentation like checklists and permits to add additional layers of controls.
The eagle-eyed among you may be starting to think at this point that the controls seem to be getting a lot easier to defeat as there is nothing physically stopping you from deviating from a safe system of work or not completing a checklist.
This is why as part of the administrative controls we have to put in monitoring measures and we periodically check that the administrative controls are being followed through our audits and inspections
These still aren’t flawless, things can be missed on audits and inspections so issues can fall through the cracks. However, admin controls are still very important and are crucial for demonstrating legal compliance if the HSE if requested.
Personal Protective Equipment
Finally, we come to the weakest control of all! Good old PPE!
Personal protective equipment really is our last resort, however, for the novice risk assessor it seems to be the go and this is a common mistake.
The problem with PPE is that if a hazard is close enough that it can be stopped by PPE it is too close.
Think about it, if I am doing some work on a motorway I would have the following controls in place to prevent me from interacting with traffic:
- Substitution – Close one lane of the motorway
- Engineering Control – Put a concrete barrier around the road.
- Administrative Controls – Reduced speed limit, Safe systems of work, permits, average speed cameras
- PPE – Hi-Viz
No, imagine I take away all the control measures except the Hi-Viz. How long do you think id last on a busy motorway?
I’m not knocking PPE, it definitely has its place but consider this last.
Collective Controls
Ok so we have gone through the principles of prevention there but there is one extra thing to bear in mind. Collective controls i.e. controls that protect multiple people are always better than individual control measures. Let’s say you have 3 people working on a flat roof, the individual controls would be that they all wear harnesses, meaning they would all need harness training, and all the harnesses would need to be inspected and checked before use. Not to mention frankly they are going to get tangled up and at some point, they will be clipping and unclipping meaning at points they may be unprotected. The collective measure however is to put a temporary handrail around the roof, which would make the work significantly easier and would offer more protection.
By following the principles of prevention for each hazard that you have identified in your risk assessment, you will be much more effective in reducing both the likelihood of those hazards causing an incident and the severity of an incident if one was to occur.
Next, up on our risk assessment journey is the recording, reviewing and communicating risk assessments, so if you want to catch the last part of the series make sure you subscribe to our Youtube channel and follow us on LinkedIn.
But for now thanks for reading and stay safe out there!
