Why risk management
By law SME only have to focus on critical risk. First base is understanding what is risk management in safety. In short SME need undertake risk assessment to understand what is and is not a “Critical Risk”. This is the process of risk assessment. You can do it yourself (and we provide a tool for this). Alternatively, we can come to your site and provide you a process for assessing your risks and controls. This is more reliable as people tend to miss what they live with every day.
This is the front end of 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. In a NZ context, the process involves identifying risks, calculating likelihood and impact. Next, it requires deciding on treatment actions.
Why risk management matters for Auckland and NZ organisations
Risk management should focus on critical risk. It starts with Risk Assessment, a process that 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. We can provide advice on how you go about this.
Winsland risk management process
We follow standard risk assessment processes to help clients understand what is H&S risk management and how to go about it. 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 resource, is a critical element of risk management that is often missed. This identifies controls that are not working as intended or no longer appropriate. Next, it enables the controls to be re-calibrated so they continue mitigate the risk.
Case study – Abano NZ – dentistry
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. In addition, 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
Winsland Risk Register Template NZ
(Free Example of Risk Register and How to Use It)