Live From Safety 2013: Risk Assessment--The Missing Link

Post From Safety 2013 Guest Blogger Steve Minshall

Risk assessment is getting a lot of play, again. I’m not sure that it ever wasn’t important, but there is resurgent interest in the topic. The reference to risk assessment as “the missing link” turns out to not be evolutionary in nature; it is simply one presenter’s way of saying that the European Union (EU) has a legal requirement for risk assessments whereas the U.S. currently does not. I know a lot of people are pro-regulation and heavier enforcement but I, happily, am not. I prefer an approach to safety that we pursue because we want to, because it’s the right thing to do.

The EU’s approach to risk assessment is commendable. On the other hand, we Americans are fairly ingenious ourselves. To that end, hearing on Monday and today that the ASSE is launching, on Wednesday, June 26 at 5:30 pm, a new Risk Assessment Institute certainly made me proud of ASSE’s tradition of advancing the safety and health of workers around the globe.

You can check out more about this launch at www.oshrisk.org. There you’ll find these two descriptive statements:

“ASSE’s Risk Assessment Institute was established to become the gateway for ASSE members to develop new risk assessment core competencies, share best practices, and access the latest risk-based information, metrics, tools, and research for both career advancement and the improvement of organizational effectiveness.”

“The ASSE Risk Assessment Institute aims to help SH&E professionals find and implement both standardized and alternative risk-based approaches and measures to lead their organizations to pro-actively prioritize, resource and mitigate risk in advance of injuries or catastrophic events.”

These are lofty objectives and ones that the Society is well-suited to lead.

In the final analysis, though, risk assessment has to work for the people who are exposed to the risk(s). If the risk assessment has no relevance to the maintenance mechanic or the production worker who has to deal with those exposures on a routine basis, how effective can it be?

The terms employee participation and engagement spring to mind. Let’s hope those are meaningful elements of the Risk Assessment Institute’s charter.