Risk Assessment Services in New Zealand

Risk assessment is a process of identification, analysis and control of risks. It is a structured, standard-based process for identifying, analysing, and controlling risk to eliminate or manage them effectively. The process is an international one with ISO 45001 being the recognised standard for health and safety. The process in a NZ context involves identifying risks, calculating likelihood and impact, and deciding on treatment actions. 

Risk assessment serves to prioritise the use of an organisation’s resources to drive workplace safety and meet legal obligations to manage risk. Things that are critical risks warrant more focus and investment than lower risks. This is the fundamental driving the current legislative change in NZ. By law, businesses in Auckland and throughout NZ – regardless of size – need to be able to demonstrate they have identified and are managing their critical risks. To do so, they need to apply an effective risk management process. This does not need to be complex and we can provide advice on how you go about this.

We follow standard risk assessment processes. Preferably we use a workshop format as that way we engage with the people in the business who really know how things work.

Identification starts the client who will typically know the critical risks based on past experience. But those working in a business become over familiar and often miss the obvious thus a Winsland consultant site audit, inspection or visit (depends on scale) will identify other candidate risks.

Analysis – The second stage is to evaluate the risk using a standard risk matrix. We are interested in sorting out what is critical versus what is low priority.

Migitigation – involves development of controls which eliminate the risk, or if this is not reasonably practicable, lower the risk.

Monitoring – in the form of audit and inspection using internal or external resouce, is a critical element of risk management that is often missed. This identifies controls that are not working as intended or no longer appropriate and enables the controls to be recalibrated so they continue mitigate the risk.

What is risky about the dentist? Maybe not what you think.

Under the Lumino brand in NZ, Abano Healthcare provide dental services across the country. As part of our engagement with Lumino, Winsland led the design and implementation of a refresh of the Lumino health and safety system. We started with risk.

The number one risk is not pulling out the wrong tooth or the drill slipping. The number one risk is less visible, but more important in terms of risk profile – its likelyhood of occurance and its consequence. And it is not found in the dental surgery. The risk is infection.

The transmission of pathogens between patients or between staff and patients, is rare thansk to strict safety protocols, but they are possible if standard precautions are not followed. Hepatitis B (HBV), Hepatitis C (HCV), and HIV are the main concerns. One of the main controls for this risk is that dental instruments are heat-sterilized between every patient, and environmental surfaces are chemically disinfected. Thus the risk of infection and the sterilisation processes are a key focus for Lumino – after all an infection outbreak could do serious reputational damage.

But there are a number of other risks in dentistry. Lumino required processes to identify and elevate the relevance of these risks. Hence the refresh of the Risk Management processes was a key part of the refresh of the Lumino health and safety system