The main cause of occupational health, safety and environmental problems is Hazards. To reduce no. of accidents and production breakdowns, identification of hazards and assessment of associated risk is a very important practice. It's known as HIRA (Hazards Identification and Risk Assessment)— limited to hazards which are harmful to people. The developed technology has resulted in transparent administration and stringent regulations. It bought importance to environment, property and reputation of the organization. An integrated methodology is developed to cover environment, people, property, reputation as these facts are equally important. In this process, if hazards are identified, it will be more accurate and will result a safer, productive workplace.
For example, laboratories can be very harmful abd dangerous places due to minimum mistakes. It can be happened by the most careful workers too. Yearly Hazard Identification and Risk Assessment is a must thing to keep workplace safe, preventing accidents. Having a good safety management program not only avoids injuries and pollution, but also makes good economic senses.
There are six steps to conduct HIRA:
Preparation:- A risk assessment team for conducting surveys and gathering relevant information should be prepared before beginning, who will represent the workers and make valid decisions for overall safety in any workplace. They will also provide a valuable avenue for feedback, which will help to identify the problem and make it easier to ensure their safety.Besides, the risk assessment team should make a detailed lists of accidents happened in previous years. Tour the workplaces in most careful manner.
Make sure the safety equipments are placed in proper way.
Assess how well safety precautions are maintained.
Frequently organize training sessions keeping their recordings.
Have regular meetings and evaluate safety plans.
Ensure everyone got all safety protocols.
Hazard Identification:- There are uncountable things can go wrong in a busy, crowded workplace, those hazards should be identified. Taking informations from the risk assessment team, all the known hazards should be listed out in advance. There are many types like physical, chemical, biological, ergonomic and even psychological hazards—which can further be separated. Risk Assessment:- The risk level of each Hazard should be deduced from low to high, and those who are more serious should be listed out. A table known as 'Risk Matrix' can be used (providing a quick look of severity and frequency or likelihood of the consequences). There are categories like Extreme, High Risk, Medium, Low Risk. Cases will be more or less considered by these.Plan Control Measures:- Control measures to prevent (firstly reduce) the chances of accidents will be set as soon as Identification of the risks and likelihood of each hazard are done. There are five Control measures categories:
¤ Elimination control=> Hazards with extremely high risk must be eliminated or removed from workplace.
¤Substitution control=> Safer alternatives to the hazardous things should be found out.
¤Engineering control=> A biological safety cabinet can be a good example, which is designed to protect the worker from exposing to pathogens.
¤Administrative control=> Any unauthorized people should not get into potentially hazardous area. Each workplace has to maintain proper card system to prevent it, which will access only the persons who have safety training.
¤PPE=> Proper uniform should be maintained (e.g. for lab, lab coat, gloves etc). ¤Record Keeping=> A risk assessment records should be kept and regularly updated. ¤Implementation and review=> All previous steps have to put in action in this step.
The risk assessment team has to obtain approval from the principal investigator and and all new preventative measures must be implemented only then. That's why, arranging meeting and getting feedbacks regularly from the staffs are important.
So, apparently these are the works of a HIRA.
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