Definition of Health, Safety, Welfare & Environmental Protection

Health is a state of well-being that includes physical, social and mental prospective. Some may say that it is the absence of disease but internationally accepted definition says it is state of well-being not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.

Safety is a term considered for absence of danger of physical harm to people, equipment, materials and structures etc. There can be different kind of harms i.e. slip, trip, fire, fall from height, electricity, moving plant & machinery etc.

Welfare means the provision of facilities for a comfortable workplace, these facilities are very basic necessities for the people at work i.e. eating, washing, seating and first aid etc.

Environmental protection is to take necessary action or measure for preventing the overall environment of the globe from any kind of harm. Areas of interest include air protection, land protection, water protection/conservation, sea life and plants etc.

health & safety

Reasons For Managing or Promoting Health & Safety

Why maintain a good standard of health and safety in an organization? There are many reasons an organization must maintain a reasonable health & safety standard.

Moral Responsibility: There are always humans working in different organizations and if they are not protected against harms they will suffer injuries or disabilities even fatalities which should be avoided morally because these things cause lot of pain and suffering or workers and their relatives/dependents etc.

Social or Legal Responsibility: In many countries this is legal obligation for an organization to provide good health and safety standards otherwise regulatory authorities will penalize them or even stop them from doing the business. Also it is social responsibility or the organization to keep its workers safe and healthy for a healthy society.

Economic / Financial Responsibilities: Organizations must maintain good standards in health & safety in order to avoid economical or financial expenses, every accident causes a company an expense that can be in the form of production loss, hospitalization, loss of time, loss of property. insurance costs and also some indirect costs like negative company reputation and investigation time, legal fees, fines etc. It also costs to overall society in terms of social security expanses etc. There are many examples of incidents that caused huge monitory losses in addition to loss of lives i.e. Chernobyl, Piper Alpha, DW Horizon and Fukoshima.

Risk Assessment Template

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Following are the templates that you can use for conducting the risk assessments for any kind of activities related to any industry like  manufacturing, production and construction etc. Files are in Word Document format and you can make changes as per your requirements.

1. Hazard Identification Checklist/Form

Hazard Identification Form Sample

This is very initial form where you need to identify whether the hazard exists or not and just tick the respective box. For more details on how to identify the hazards you can read our detailed article on risk assessment process step-1. The sample is shown to right and the same can be downloaded in the word format without watermark by clicking the below link.

Hazard Identification Form.Doc

2. Risk Assessment Form
After identifying the hazards related to any activity now you need to find out quantitatively the value of initial or actual risk with out any control measures and than recalculate residual risk after suggesting control measures. You will need the risk assessment matrix for finding out the likelihood and severity of the occurance. For more details on how to estimate likelihood and severity of a risk refer to our article on risk assessment process Step-2.

The sample template of risk assessment form  is shown to right and the same can be downloaded in the word format without watermark by clicking the below link.

Risk Assessment Template.doc

3. Risk Assessment Matrix
The risk assessment matrix is used for estimating the probability or likelihood and severity of occurance of an unwanted event. While deciding the value every personnel involved in the activity should be invited to give his opinion and decide about the value. There can be many other versions of the matrix but we found the one very useful that is given below that can be used for health safety and environmental risk assessments. The sample risk assessment matrix is shown to the right and word document of the same can be downloaded by clicking the below link.

Risk Assessment Matrix.doc

I hope by using these three forms you can understand and record your risk assessment properly and a professional way.

Risk Management

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Risk management as understood by its name is process of managing the risks, that involves first identify, assess and prioritize the risks and then implement the coordinated measures and/or resources to eliminate, minimize and monitor the probability and impact of the unwanted events or situations.

The risk that we need to manage can be of any type i.e. credit risk, uncertainty in financial markets, project failure at any stage of the project, natural disaster, IT infrastructure failure, bankruptcy of creditors, hacking of servers and an accident or attack from enemies etc.

Organizations adopt various approaches for managing the risks some may prefer to transfer the risk to other parties i.e. through insurance of plants and machinery and even complete projects (although there is still risk of bankruptcy of insurer). Some may decide to avoid it by altering the processes and or by denying the orders from a fragile client. Also some organizations manage the creditors risks by increasing their profit margins etc. Risk sharing is another approach in which you share the benefit of gain or burden of loss from a risk and from measures taken to mitigate the risk.

There are several risk management standards available globally and that consider varying aspects of the risk management depending upon the target business areas i.e. engineering, project management and IT etc. There are risk management standards by PMI, NIST and ISO.

Risk management methods are adopted mostly in the following sequence:

  1. To identify, characterize, and assess the potential threats to company assets or operations
  2. To assess the vulnerability of critical assets and processes to specific threats
  3. To determine the risk through risk assessment approach
  4. Identify the practical ways to reduce the risks
  5. Prioritize risk reduction measures based on a business strategy

For more studies on risk management I suggest you to visit the Wikipedia on risk management.
Also you can read more about ISO 31000 on Wikipedia.
Image Credit Mack2happy