Risk Assessment As a Part of Continuous Safety Management. Tomas Backström, National Institute for Working Life, 171 84 Solna, telephone 08-617 03 74, fax 08-653 17 50, e-mail tbacks@niwl.se
Risk assessment can be used as a base in a lot of different types of decisions. Firstly, it can be part of the society’s control of safety for the third party, e.g. those who five close to dangerous plants or who travel with public transport systems, Secondly, risk assessment can be a part of the approval process for products, to make it plausible that they are safe enough. Thirdly, risk assessment can be used as a part of continuos and commonplace safety management. It is this use of risk assessment, that will be looked upon in this paper.
For risk assessment to work as a part of a company's running management, it must fit the way the company usually organizes improvement processes. Two dimensions can be used to describe different types of organization of improvement processes. The first dimension concerns if the company imagine improvement as individual projects or as a process of continuos improvements. The second dimension concerns if improvement is closely controlled by the management (or project groups formed by the management) or if ordinary work teams participate in the control.
Research has shown that continuos improvement where ordinary work teams participate shows better results, both concerning production and Safety & Health criteria, than other types of organization of improvements, e.g. management controlled improvement projects. That participation is good for safety is confirmed by research studying which organizational factors differs between companies with good respectively bad safety.
Certain demands have to be fulfilled by a risk assessment method, if it is to work as a part of participative continuos improvement. The result of the risk assessment must be comprehensible and credible to the workers. Best is if the method is easy to use, so that workers are able to participate in the analysis. It then has to be concrete. And the method must include, not only the analysis phase, but the whole work process of the analysis: from structuring of the object of the analyze, to deciding on measures to take. If the method is not adapted for workers use, it is important that the result can be visualized in an understandable way. There must also be a possibility for workers to influence the result in accordance with their experiences.
Go to:
Table of Contents of the 1997
SRA-Europe Conference
Program of the 1997 SRA-Europe Conference
RiskWorld Welcome Page
Tec-Com, Inc.