This article addresses the requirements of a contractor’s Health and Safety file, which is legally required when a contractor works on a customer’s site.
I will describe the Hazard and Risk Assessment process, but you can use the same format for the Environmental Aspects and Impacts Assessment. The scoring of the Aspects and Impacts Assessment is somewhat different to the Hazard and Risk Assessment. I usually do the two together and let the secretary sort them out later.
Risk Assessment
The first document I would put in a contractor’s Health and Safety File is the Risk Assessment.
I am starting with Hazard and Risk assessments because the Risk Assessment gives you a good idea of the other documents you may need.
The company (customer) should have a Hazard and Risk Assessment for the area where the contractor will be working. (If you don’t have a Hazard and Risk Assessment, this is a good time to do one.) However, the risks change, and need to be assessed, once a contractor is working on site. The contractor should also have a Hazard and Risk Assessment for the work he usually does. These two Hazard and Risk Assessments are a good starting point for the Hazard and Risk Assessment of the job the contractor will do.
The first step is for a responsible person (usually the person in charge of the job) from the contractor and a responsible person from the company to inspect the site. Note the hazards related to the contracting job. Do not evaluate the hazards at this stage.
The second step is to meet and document together the hazards and risks related to the job. This Hazard and Risk team should consist of the responsible persons who inspected the site, the contractor’s senior manager and the lowest ranked worker you can get who would be useful in a meeting. This is usually a supervisor or senior worker. (Such workers often know about hazards that their managers are unaware of.) A senior manager and the person in charge of the area being worked on should represent the company. One person acts as secretary and fills out the Hazard and Risk form.
Documentation
There are various ways to document this and you can find different forms on the internet. I will describe the form and method I have used successfully and refined for the last twenty odd years.
I have laid out my form in landscape on an A3 paper, or two A4 papers, portrait, cellotaped together, to give the equivalent of a landscape A3 paper. At this point, I suggest you print a copy of the form, so you can refer to it.
Below is an example of the Excel spreadsheet I use to record Hazard and Risk Assessments:
Download Hazard and Risk Analysis.pdf
I fill the form in in columns and the column headings are:
- Headings: Plant, process, product name if applicable, date, location, person responsible and similar information. This is all at the top of the page.
- Activity: Describe the work the contractor must do.
- Number: This is simply as sequential number that allows sorting of the entries.
- Hazard, or for the environment “Activity”: There will be more one.
- Risk, or for the environment “Impact”: The Hazard is what could happen. The Risk is the potential consequence.
- Severity: This is a numeric between 1 and 10. We will come back to it later.
- Potential causes: There can be more than one cause for a hazard.
I will explain Probability, Current controls and how we calculate Severity, Probability, Mitigation and SPN (Significance Priority Numbers) in the next article in this series of articles. I will also deal with corrective action and recalculating SPN.
Author
Mike Morrison
