Last week in my CoSHH diary entry I discussed ideas which my business put into action to reduce the amount of health and safety work that would be required. This week I can now report on the method by which we conducted compliant CoSHH risk assessment, again using a common sense approach.
On Monday my line managers had been trained to CIEH (Chartered Institute of Environmental Health) Level 2 in The Principles of Risk Assessment. This one day course was designed to give my managers the understanding to identify risks and carry out adequate CoSHH assessment. The following morning I gave my line managers instructions to carry out risk assessment of all the tasks, processes and anything else that involved the use of hazardous chemicals. What did I request? Start with your most hazardous tasks first and delegate your workers to complete task descriptions detailing the task, the chemical used and it's usage data e.g. application, quantity and duration. By doing this we would see how the tasks where being carried out rather than how the line managers felt they should be carried out. This would also point out any areas of training that would be necessary. REMEMBER! It is useless to write something on paper that is not being carried out in the workplace. Find out what is really going on then re-train if necessary.
Once the line managers had completed their preliminary investigations by assigning tasks to each of their team, they were then responsible to carry out the risk assessment process. It is common knowledge and totally untrue that you must be a qualified, accredited or certified health and safety professional to carry out CoSHH risk assessment. All you have to be is a person who understands the chemical being used, the task being carried out (in detail), the person carrying out the task and how to correctly apply adequate control measures and personal protective equipment. It may sound a lot to some but it is not. You do need to be careful of more hazardous chemicals and tasks which may need a greater understanding of health and safety. For these it is always safer to ask for support from your supplier or the manufacturer for your particular task. If you are not totally sure then ASK! This information must be supplied by the manufacturer/supplier with reference to Section 6.1 of the Health and Safety at Work Act. Like me you may shock some people when you mention that and it's always good to have it up your sleeve if information is not forthcoming.
In order for my line managers to carry out their CoSHH assessments correctly and to keep them standardised I decided to buy a piece of online management software. I looked for two basic requirements, one - a fixed format for data collection and conformity, and two - a visual and easy to read report that would provide a task based CoSHH risk assessment readable by my workforce (the Lehmen). I did a search using Google for "CoSHH software", there was a handful of credible systems available online so I trialed a few before choosing the one for me. One thing I stayed well clear of was those software companies that provided downloadable risk assessments as I knew from reading the HSE CoSHH web site that I needed my own task based risk assessments. It is seen as bad practice to use someone elses CoSHH assessment and leads to a generic CoSHH assessment being used which increases risk to your worker which could also substantially increases penalties and fines in a tribunal.
Now I had all that I needed in place and could confidently wait for my CoSHH assessments to start rolling in. The software we chose provided a service of obtaining Safety Data Sheets on our behalf and this saved a lot of time and so my managers could concentrate on completing the actual assessments. The software manages the periodical review of CoSHH assessments via email to my risk assessment team so everything should be easy to manage in the future. I could always login and see how things were going at any point.
My diary will continue next week with what happened during a REAL Health and Safety Executive inspector's audit.
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