The main purpose of the Continuous Risk Assessment

Most incidents in the workplace are caused by insufficient management controls. A continuous risk assessment is an informal risk assessment that is performed on an ongoing basis. It is a powerful and important form of assessment and should take place continuously, as an integral part of day to day management. The main purpose of the continuous risk assessment should be to:

• identify hazards with the purpose of immediately treating the possible risk
• gather information to feed back to issue-based risk assessment; and
• gather information to feed back to the Baseline Risk Assessment
• identify tasks and activities to create a Task Risk Assessment

The assessment is conducted at an operational level and considers information and feedback gathered by any employee in a management position, and particularly those with first-hand knowledge and experience of the systems, processes and activities that take place in the workplace.

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A continuous risk assessment is not supposed to be sophisticated or complicated, but should merely aim at creating hazard awareness through hazard identification. In most cases, it will be a good start for a supervisor to simply look and see what is happening in the workplace. By simply observing what is happening and how staff is dealing with challenges that could pose a risk, the supervisor should get a first-hand indication of possible risks. But checklists, like inspection checklists, pre-use checklists or critical parts and paths checklists can also play an important role in identifying and registering possible risk immediately.

It is important to keep a record of any possible threat reported, regardless of whether it was considered too small or too far-fetched. The workplace is a dynamic place, with people arriving in different moods, attitudes and conditions every day. What can be considered to be safe today, might pose a threat tomorrow.
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Although the assessment should not be too complicated, companies and employees shouldn’t take performing the assessment too lightly. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to admit that an effective health and safety management will contribute to the success of the business. Accident costs are often underestimated.

To keep companies on their toes, it has become compulsory to carry out a risk assessment, to prepare a safety statement and to implement what has been written down. Health and safety inspectors visiting a workplace will want to know how health and safety is managed.

Violating these rules could cost companies dearly, as the inspector is allowed to close down a site until such time as it is deemed safe again. But whilst this might cost significantly, being accused of acting immorally or unethically could bring a company to its knees.

Employers are ethically bound to do all they can to ensure that employees do not suffer illness, a serious accident or death on-site. As any catastrophe could be caused by a simple incident, performing a simple risk assessment continuously could prevent many disasters from happening.