Safety (General)

Risks and Hazard

Safety is generally understood as inhibiting a significant impact on risk of injury or damage to property. A hazard is anything that has the potential to cause harm. Hazards can affect people, property, and processes. For example, occupational risk refers to the likelihood of an injury or an illness due to the exposure to a hazard.

Risk Management

A systematic application of policies, procedures and practices to establish risk approach. It is the process of measuring and assessing the risk and the development of strategies to manage it. Strategies are transferring the risk, avoiding the risk, reducing the effect of the risk, and accepting some consequences of a risk.

Risk Assessment

The main aim of risk assessment is to protect people's health and safety. Risk assessment helps to minimize the possibility of individuals being harmed due to any activities. For example, in business and industry, all employers need to carry out regular risk assessments. Risk assessment can be performed as follows:

• Collecting information: location of workplace, properties of workers, work equipment, materials used, tasks performed by employees, hazards already identified, risks of already-existing hazards, prevalance accidents, legal conditions, technical data of the equipment, work manuals, measurements of hazardous and strenuous factors at the workplace, records of work accidents and occupational diseases, observation of the environment, tasks performed at the workplace, tasks performed outside the workplace, and interviewing employees.
• Identifying hazards
• Assessing risk caused by hazards (estimating the probability and severity of results and deciding whether risk is acceptable): each identifed should be classified according to small-, medium-, or high-risks categories. To make a decision, probabilities like highly improbable (should not occur during the entire exposure period of a person), probable (may occur only a few times during the exposure period of a person), moderately harmful (accidents and illnesses not causing prolonged distress), medium harmful (accidents and illnesses causing moderate but prolonged or periodically recurring distress), extremely harmful (accidents and illnesses causing heavy and permanent distress and/or death). Further steps at this stage is to decide if the risk arising from a hazard would be acceptable. It should be remembered that the risk assessment should be performed together with the person under risk actively. Decision on risk should be done with the involvement of the person under risk and this persons’ gender, age, and health status should be considered.
• The planning of actions to reduce risk: After reviewing the assessment, a high-risk and unacceptable situation should be eliminated or reduced as soon as possible. If the risk is at medium level and assessed as acceptable, actions to reduce its level should be planned. And if the risk is small and assessed as acceptable, it is necessary to ensure that it will remain at the same level.

Preventive and protective measures should be implemented in the following order of

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