I’ve had a number of conversations with chemists at all levels of experience and expertise over the years about what constitutes a prudent risk assessment for a laboratory process.
This week, the Safety of Work podcast discusses this under the title of:
Ep. 101 When should incidents cause us to question risk assessments?
https://safetyofwork.com/episodes/ep-101-when-should-incidents-cause-us-to-question-risk-assessments
It uses a fairly extreme example (the Fukushima nuclear disaster) to identify the limitations of quantitative risk assessment and identifies common traps in conducting these.
The discussion is 61 minutes long, so it is hard to summarize, but two key points that I was glad they highlighted were:
- “...every assumption you make is an obligation... An assumption is something that immediately goes onto your to do list of things that you need to check and ensure. The moment you write down my assumption is that the largest wave is 10 meters. That's an obligation to go out and find good evidence that, in fact, that is right. And if not, replace it with the correct number and redesign accordingly."
and
- “When should incidents cause us to question our risk assessments? ...we should be questioning risk assessments constantly. Incidents should just be a reminder that this is something we should be doing constantly."
The takeaways:
• Uncertainty is always present in risk assessments
• You can never identify all failure modes
• Three things always missing: anticipating mistakes, anticipating how complex tech is always changing, anticipating all of the little plastic connectors that can break
• Assumptions - be wary, check all the what-if scenarios
• Just because a regulator declares something safe, doesn’t mean it is
• Answering our episode question: You must question risk assessments CONSTANTLY
Happily, this podcast also provides a transcript of the discussion (in a second tab on the top of the page), so it is easy to review the ideas of the podcast within devoting the full hour to listening to it sight unseen.
I recommend listening if you need to work with people new to risk assessments.
- Ralph
Ralph Stuart, CIH, CCHO
ralph**At_Symbol_Here**rstuartcih.org
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