Working safely:

Contents

Part one:
Introducing working safely 2

Part two:
Defining hazard and risk 7

Part three:
Identifying common hazards 24

Part four:
Improving safety performance 43

Part five:
Protecting our environment 58

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 Part one:
Introducing working safely

Key learning point

1. Why is it important to work safely?

Notes:

Why is it important to work safely?

Because you – yes, YOU – have a vital role to play in keeping yourself safe
AND in helping to keep others safe. There is no reason why people should
get hurt at work and, while your employers have a clear responsibility to keep
people safe at work, they cannot do that without your understanding and co-
operation. It makes sense, it’s the right thing to do and it’s the law!

You need to understand your personal role in achieving safe and healthy
working and how to help your employer to do the best job they can to keep
you safe and healthy.

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 Working safely is all about working in ways that reduce the chance of
you:

• being injured
• injuring someone else
• damaging your health
• damaging someone else’s health.

Lots of people DO get hurt at work and one day it might be you –
or your son or daughter, or partner or close friend. Everyone
thinks that it won’t happen to them – but it does.

And it’s not just the individual harmed who is affected. All those
involved – witnesses, workmates, families, managers, everybody
who has to deal with the incident – are affected!

Notes:

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4. Who is responsible for health and safety in your workplace?

………… – this includes ………………………………………….…………….

……………………………………………………………………………………..

Health and safety legislation places a number of duties on employers

and employees. Failure to carry out these duties can result in fines
and, in extreme cases, imprisonment. The Health and Safety at Work
etc Act 1974 outlines the duties of employers and employees.

5. Who is responsible for your actions in the workplace?

…………. – however, the basic principle is that every employee must take
reasonable care for the health and safety of themselves and of others who
may be affected by their acts or omissions.

6. Insurance will fully cover the financial losses if a worker is injured and
cannot work – true or false?

……………..………… – there are/are no financial

penalties if you are injured or ill and cannot work.

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7. There is a risk of your organisation being fined if you are responsible for
someone being injured – true or false?

………………………. – your organisation can/cannot be fined as a result

of your actions.

Notes:

Summary
1. It is important to work safely…

Remember: working safely is in your best interest!

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 Part two:
Defining hazard and risk

Key learning points

1. What kind of things can cause you or others harm?
2. What is risk?
3. How can risks be controlled?
4. How do you decide what to do about risks?

Notes:

What kind of things can cause you or others harm?

Even the simplest thing you can think of doing, or something you’ve done
dozens of times before, could have the potential to cause harm. For
example…

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 What do you think about before you overtake a car?

These things you’ve just thought about – they are hazards. Put simply:

a hazard is anything that has the potential to cause harm to you or others.

Notes:

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This section of the course looks at what sort of things can cause you or others
harm, how likely it is to happen, how severe the harm may be and what you
can do to eliminate, reduce or control it.

If you want to avoid harming yourself and others, the first step is to identify
that there is a hazard. Hazards generally fall into six broad groups.

1. Mechanical – for example, moving machinery.

2. Physical – for example, slipping on a wet floor.

3. Chemical – for example, spill of corrosive chemicals.

4. Environmental – for example, exhaust fumes.

5. Biological – for example, household waste.

6. Organisational – for example, excessive workloads.

However, not all hazards are easy to identify. Think about a computer. Is it a
possible hazard? – yes, it could be. Why is it a possible hazard? – because if
the desk is badly set up (for example, the keyboard is too far away from you)
and you work on the computer for most of the day, you could, over time,
develop a number of arm, shoulder and wrist problems.

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This is the difficulty with some types of hazard – symptoms can take a long
time to show. For example:

• noise – deafness

• vibration – hand-arm vibration syndrome

• dust – occupational asthma

• chemicals – dermatitis

• poor posture – bad back

• exposure to radiation – skin cancer

• stress - can be caused by tight deadlines.

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However, most accidents at work happen because people haven’t noticed a
hazard or they underestimated how hazardous the situation really is.

YOU always have to be on the lookout for hazards and DO something about
them, when and if you find them.

Give five examples of hazards in your workplace

[turn to page 22 to complete the exercise]

Another problem with hazards is that you may not know they can cause harm.

This is the difficulty with identifying hazards in the

workplace. There are some hazards that you cannot
see, feel, smell or taste, such as carbon monoxide.

In addition, there may be hazards that some people

are more vulnerable to than others, such as an
allergy to nuts.

Notes:

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What is risk?
Just because something might be a hazard, it doesn’t mean someone is
always going to get hurt. What you need to do is think about what the
chances are of you (or your colleagues, visitors or the environment) being
harmed by the hazard. You then need to think about how severe the harm
could be – very serious or minor – combined with how likely it is to happen.
This tells us about the level of risk.

Would you use the ladder?

Yes/No Yes/No

You’ve just calculated the risk – you decided whether or not it was safe to use
the ladder, based on the situation. Therefore:

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 Risk is the chance of something happening (an event/situation) that has the
potential to cause harm (to a person/company/society).

However, there isn’t necessarily a high risk just because there is a hazard.
The level of risk depends on how likely it is that the event or situation will
happen (likelihood) and how severe the harm could be (severity or
consequence).

For example – scissors are a hazard.

• How likely are you to hurt yourself when

using them? It’s unlikely if you use them
properly. But if you did hurt yourself, how
severe would the harm be? For most people
it is likely to be a cut. So the level of risk
would be low.

Notes:

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 What are the risks from the five example hazards in your
workplace?
[turn to page 22 to complete the exercise]

You have now thought about five example hazards in your workplace and
identified what the risks are in relation to those hazards. Now you need to
think about what you can do about them. To do this you need to do a risk
assessment.

Every day you do dozens of risk assessments. Think

about this scenario.

You live in a house with a seven-month-old baby. The

baby has just started to crawl and has made his way
along the landing to the top of the stairs. The stairs
are a hazard and the risk is that the baby is going to
fall down them and hurt himself. What would you do?

You consider the hazard (the stairs), you think about

the risk (how likely it is that the baby will fall down the
stairs and if he did, how badly he would be hurt), and
then you decide what to do – in this situation, you’d
probably say the risk is high and you’d get a
stair-gate.

This is risk assessment. It’s all about:

• looking at what you do

• asking the right questions to establish whether what you do will be safe
• deciding what else you need to do to make it safe if you’re not satisfied
• checking to see whether your plans to make things safer actually worked.

Once you’ve done all that, you then need to consider whether you’re happy
with it or whether you need to go further and make it even safer.
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 Notes:

For many of the jobs you do, risk assessments will

have already been carried out and you will be told
what you need to do. Your employer is required by
law to carry out these risk assessments as part of
their duty to you and your work colleagues.

However, you are likely to know as much about how

you do your work as the people in your organisation
who carry out the risk assessments – maybe more.
For this reason it is a good idea for you to be
involved in the risk assessment process.

Notes:

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 How can risks be controlled?
If there is a risk, the best way to control it is to remove it altogether by
eliminating the hazard.

Hazard Risk Control the risk

(open drawer) (depends on the chance Eliminate
of a person tripping over the hazard
the open drawer and the (close drawer)
severity of the injury)

However, it is not always possible to do this. So, if you cannot eliminate the
hazard, reduce it.

Hazard Risk Control the risk Control the risk

(overloaded (depends on the eliminate hazard reduce the hazard
forklift truck) chance of load (wrong solution – (load fewer
falling and the job can’t be packages on the
severity of done) forklift truck)
injury/damage)

In the example of the filing cabinet, it is very easy to eliminate the hazard –
you can close the drawer. However, it is not always that simple, for
example…

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 Hazard Risk Control the risk Control the risk
(oncoming (depends on the eliminate hazard? reduce hazard?
cars) chance of being (close the road (slow the cars down
hit by a car and – not practical) – not practical)
severity of injury)

What do you do if you cannot eliminate or reduce the hazard? You introduce
risk controls called workplace precautions – such as a piece of equipment
or a procedure. However, they should be introduced in the following order:

• Use an enclosure or a barrier that keeps people and the

hazard apart – for example, place cones around the area
of the road you are working in.

• If you can’t introduce a barrier or enclosure, use a

safe system of work (a written method of working
that minimises the risks associated with the task) –
such as a procedure that requires you to stay in
the coned-off area.

• If you can’t introduce an enclosure or barrier, or a

safe system of work, the last workplace precaution to
introduce is personal protective equipment – such as
boots, ear defenders or gloves. BUT this is the last
line of defence. It is totally dependent on you to wear
them!

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This is the problem with workplace precautions – most, if not all, have weak
links. In the roadworks example, the weak link could be that it is reliant on you
putting down the cones, staying in the coned area or wearing your personal
protective equipment.

The best risk controls are those that do not rely on you having to do
something. For example, if the traffic is diverted when you arrive to repair the
road, you do not have to rely on setting up a barrier yourself.

Remember: it is not always possible to work in a hazard-free environment but,

by using appropriate workplace precautions, it is possible to keep the risks in
your workplace at a very low level.

What is the best way to control the risks from the five
example hazards in your workplace?
[turn to page 23 to complete the exercise]

Notes:

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How do you decide what to do about risks?
It is possible, in most circumstances, to reduce risk to a very low level. For
example…

You could polish the corridors of your workplace by hand,

instead of using an electric floor polisher. This would
remove the chance of someone tripping over the cable and
hurting themselves. However, the inconvenience to you,
the extra time it would take, the additional cost and the
possible long-term damage to your back and knees are so
great that they outweigh the benefit of the risk reduction.

In legal terms, we say it is not ‘reasonably practicable’ to

polish the floor by hand.

Therefore, if the cost – in terms of time, effort, money or

inconvenience – associated with the risk control outweighs
the benefits of the risk reduction, then it is not reasonably
practicable to use that risk control.

With this in mind, what can you do to control the risk from
the five example hazards in your workplace?
[turn to page 23 to complete the exercise]

Notes:

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Do you think that any of the risk controls you use at the moment involve too
much time or effort, or cause a lot of inconvenience? Are you tempted to
ignore them? – DON’T

What you should do is discuss them with your supervisor BUT carry on using
them.

Summary
1. The kind of things that can cause you and others harm are…

2. Risk is…

3. You can control risks by…

4. You decide what to do about risks by…

What you have just learnt about hazards, risks and risk control should
ensure that at the end of your working
day you go home safely.

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21
 What is the What is the
hazard? risk?

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

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 What is the best way What can you do to control the
to control the risk? risk?

Eliminate?

Reduce?

Workplace precautions?

Eliminate?

Reduce?

Workplace precautions?

Eliminate?

Reduce?

Workplace precautions?

Eliminate?

Reduce?

Workplace precautions?

Eliminate?

Reduce?

Workplace precautions?

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 Part three:
Identifying common hazards

Key learning points

1. What are some common hazards?
2. What can you do about common hazards?

Notes:

What are common hazards?

Common hazards exist in every workplace. You need to be able to recognise
them and know what to do about them.

What can you do about common hazards?

You’re about to play a board game! As you work your way through the game
you’ll identify several common hazards. During this session, you’ll also find
out what you can do about common hazards – have fun!

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