Risk Assessments, Safety Statements and all that…

By Marcus Bailie

Economy of Effort!
Those of you with little else to do may recall an article from 1996 which looked at what a Risk Assessment definitely was not. (Risk Assessments, Safety Statements and all the guff! - Adventure Education Vol. 13 number 3, Autumn 1996, and on the Licensing Authority's web site; www.aala.org.uk). Now, ten years later, I at last feel comfortable about putting into print some of the things which Risk Assessments are about, or to be more precise how they may be viewed and used.

I recently explained how the completion of an NGB award, or an equivalent package of training and assessment, is equivalent to a Risk Assessment (Cycle of Competence - Horizons Issue 34, Summer 2006). Completing the Award identifies who may be harmed and how, what control measures are appropriate to adequately manage the risks with regards to the benefits and the safety of the activity, but it will additionally ensure that the holder actually understands, and can implement, these various controls.

In this piece I would like to look at how a Risk Assessment document can be used, indeed can most usefully be used, with an impressive economy of bureaucratic efficiency. It is the principle of 'why let one piece of work only be used for one task when it can be used for two or more?'

The Principle
The concept for me sprang from a most sensible suggestion by Jan Bradford, a former Senior Inspector of the Licensing Authority. She used to say to activity providers: "When you are writing a risk assessment just think of the sorts of things you would say when inducting a new employee, and write it down. A sort of Induction Checklist". The natural progression from this is to actually use it like one.

Induction
Consider the scene. The new employee may well be qualified in the activity into which he or she is being inducted, but not familiar either with the venues or the ethos of the new employer. They may be inducted by tagging along with one of the experienced instructors, or the new instructor may 'tag along at the back of the group' accompanied by, say, the Chief Instructor (CI) who talks through what they see taking place with the group. They will look at what the instructor in charge is likely to do with this particular group under these particular conditions and doubtless the CI will outline why he needed to do that. (E.g. "Note that he avoided that area over there because there is loose rock immediately above it".) The CI would probably also go through what an instructor of this activity at this venue ought to do at various key points in the activity when conditions are different, or should an incident happen. Again it will be relevant to discuss why the instructor would need to do that.

Telling people not only what they must do, but also why they must do it, is common sense. Often it makes it easier for us to remember what it is we are expected to do. In addition it will make it easier for us to decide how best to respond in a similar but not identical situation, or as the circumstances change. That is, we are more likely to get the priorities right.

To me this sounds very similar to the familiar Who may be harmed, How, and What does the instructor need to do to achieve it. That is, a traditional 5-Steps to Risk Assessment approach. Different in fact, only in the ordering of the information; What must be done and who is to do it is stated first, followed by why it must be done.

Note that during the induction of an already qualified person it would not be necessary to go over things which would have been covered in the NGB Award, merely make reference to HOW it should be applied in various circumstances.

Now suppose that the Chief Instructor, or the most experienced instructor, or whoever is actually doing the inducting, had a Check List to work from. They would likely have a browse through the Check List before commencing the session, possibly at times during the session, and almost certainly at the end of the session to ensure that nothing critical had been omitted. They may even decide to sign and date it, and drop it into the new instructor's personnel file, as evidence that this new employee had undergone this induction.

The Check List could, of course, be nothing other than a copy of the provider's Risk Assessment for that activity, or that venue if it requires actions significantly different from the situations which would have been addressed on the NGB course. This of course assumes that the provider has used Jan's Technique when writing the original Risk Assessment. It manifestly will NOT work if the original Risk Assessment was prepared using the conventional 5-Steps method.

This exercise could be repeated for as many activities and venues as are considered necessary, thus building up an Induction Record of the individual instructor. This in itself is a useful way of checking, at some later stage, who has done what. With a lot of staff and a lot of activities this can be a nightmare!

Monitoring

Then again, when it comes to monitoring (more properly known as 'field monitoring') of a particular instructor the Check List can be brought out again. This time it is unlikely that every session or venue will be monitored for every instructor, but over a period of years management should aim to cover their complete portfolio of instructors, activities and venues. In this case it is equally likely for the Chief Instructor (or equivalent) to decide that standard practices seem to be different to what the written procedures state. Management can then decide which is better, what they actually do or what they used to do, and modify either future practice or the original document, i.e. the Risk Assessment.

Thus you would also be satisfying the requirement that your risk assessments should be reviewed 'from time to time.

Training

I could push my luck by finally suggesting that the Check List can be easily changed into a Training Syllabus when the decision is to provide internal training and assessment rather than an NGB award. In this case it is likely to be better to group similar bits of the list together under separate headings (e.g. 'spotting techniques, incident management, educational content, manner of delivery, etc.) rather than directly from the original order.

Now the checklist is a Training record, and each bit can be ticked off as it is satisfactorily completed. Again keeping a copy of this in the instructor's personnel file will help management to keep track of who has done what.

Summary

Now this isn't rocket science, merely a reflection of good practice over the years before the current era where written proof has become so crucial. I argue that we can maintain the traditional good practice AND satisfy the imperative of the written word. We can also address safety issues in perspective alongside the ethos of instructing, the philosophy of the centre, customer satisfaction, educational content, etc.. The Check List approach also strikes me as being the complete opposite to the dubious practice of downloading Risk Assessments from some central pool or commercial package, with no compulsion even to read it!

I am reminded that the recently revised version of 5-Steps to Risk Assessment (June 2006) contains the following passage when referring to the 5-Steps approach:

"This is not the only way to do a risk assessment, there are other methods that work well, particularly for more complex risks and circumstances".

Yippeeeee!

For years we have been arguing that the risks we encounter ARE more complex, not least because our aim is usually NOT to continually reduce risk, but to get the right balance between benefits, hazards and controls, the so called 'Triangle of Risk'. The generally good safety record of adventure activities in well-led sessions is no accident. Moreover, the mechanisms which have produced this record have evolved, not been invented. It is important that we do not lose this as we try to accommodate the requirements of the modern world.

Author Notes: Marcus Bailie, Head of Inspection, The Adventure  Activities Licensing Authority.

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