What is it?

The philosophy around managing health and safety revolves around the concept of identifying hazards, assessing risks, defining control measures that adequately manage the risks and recording the findings.

It is a legal requirement that all employers are required to carry out a suitable and sufficient assessment of health and safety risks to which their employees and others are exposed as a result of the organisation's business activities.

ABBEY PHYSIO conduct General Risk Assessments in addition to targeted risk and ergonomic  assessments as follows:

• Manual Handling

• Fire

• COSSH

• VDU

• Ergonomics - Sometimes it may become apparent in a workplace that recurring complaints from individual workers arise in one area of the process or the production floor. These complaints or specific injuries may be in one particular task only. A specific workplace Ergonomic Evaluation will:

  • Assess the area from a human performance perspective
  • Identify the factors of the task, equipment or work system which may be causative
  • Make recommendations for improvements to eliminate or reduce the adverse occurrence

What will it give you?

Important aims of the General Risk Assessment are:

• To provide evidence that risks in relation to work and the workplace have been considered.

• That the organisation is complying with standards set out by relevant statutory provisions

• Where compliance is not yet achieved, that actions have been identified that will result in compliance.

• The completed General Risk Assessment identifies and records remedial actions that should be implemented in order to reduce the risk so far as is reasonably practicable

How do we approach it?

The assessment involves the following activities

• A visit to the premises to assess levels of compliance Irish Health and Safety law.

• Examination of available health and safety related documentation for the workplace, the work activities and the people employed.

• Interviews with representatives of the various jobs, including supervisory/management as considered necessary.

• Inspection of all areas to identify the types of hazards present in the workplace.

• Examination and review of the Procedures and Measures in place for controlling risks to health and safety.

• To carry out the assessment effectively, the assessor may need access to all areas of the premises.

• For smaller organisations and those where there are few risks and those that exist are relatively low level, a General Risk Assessment may be all that is required.

• For more complex situations, however, the General Risk Assessment may only identify areas of risk and the recommended actions may include the need to carry out more specific risk assessments.