It’s Common Sense… Isn’t It?

Posted on May 6, 2014

At Courtley, we get many queries about risk assessments, and the one thing that stands out is the confusion concerning when a risk assessment is needed.

Quite a lot of the time the confusion can be caused by the notion of common sense; do you need a risk assessment to tell you not to put your hand in that machine?

Strangely the answer also comes down to common sense; if the activity could reasonably cause significant harm to someone, then it needs a risk assessment, and the control measures should list everything that you should do to avoid getting hurt; i.e. don’t put your hand inside that wood chipper.

Taking the above point, you may be surprised to hear that we have seen risk assessments for a variety of tasks which really aren’t dangerous; such as using a stapler and answering the phone.

Then there are the risk assessments which go the other way; for example, we were asked to renew a list of 30 assessments, and they all had exactly the same information in them.

Therefore, when deciding which risk assessments to write and what to put in them; always use common sense and never copy from other risk assessments.