The traditional concept of managing risk with hazards has changed with the new Health & Safety at Work Act.
The idea of eliminate, isolate or minimise has been adjusted and your risk assessment approach and documentation should do so too.
Closely following Australia's Work Health & Safety and international ISO standards we now need to look at a spectrum of risk management controls from the ideal situation of risk elimination and working down through a process of minimisation with preferred techniques. Isolation being just one of the options available to us.
Multiple prescriptive techniques are recognised as valid and effective risk minimisation methods.
Eliminating the hazard is the perfect result of course but most of the time unrealistic. The next best preferred method is to substitute the hazard for something less risky, followed by the previously recognised isolation method. Isolation is often a good engineering control which is the most common method for machine hazards. Controls such as guards and emergency cut-offs are examples of engineering controls.
Administrate or 'Administrative controls' follow engineered methods. Signs, policy, procedures and training are all administrative options. Finally Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) should be used.
These control methods are not mutually exclusive and need to be used in conjunction with each other. Risk is part of business and the premise of risk management under the new Act requires us to assess hazards on a continual basis with these methods and techniques in mind.
These changes are now reflected in our Health & Safety cloud based software in functionality and the documentation it produces:
Click to zoom
For more information on our cloud based Health & Safety software click here.