Risk Assessment

The purpose of this strategy document is to detail the arrangements that Northumbria University has developed to ensure implementation of the Management of Health & Safety at Work Regulations 1999 and the University Health & Safety Policy and to ensure that the standard and quality of the assessments are suitable and sufficient.

The strategy identifies a process for Schools and Departments to follow to ensure that all significant risks have been assessed and provides advice on how to carry out the assessments. 

The strategy also contains pro-formas for all schools and departments to use to enable to University have standardised risk assessments. 

Almost all of the measures put in place to safeguard peoples’ health, safety and welfare are driven by findings of risk assessments. The University must assess in a suitable and sufficient manner risks resulting from its undertakings and prevent those risks from being realised, which may cause a person harm.

All Schools and Services are responsible for undertaking their own risk assessments - as detailed in the University’s Health and Safety Policy but help and advice is available from the University’s Health, Safety and Environment Office to fulfil this obligation. Contact us for more information or if you require any training to undertake risk assessments.

The Health & Safety Adviser has developed a number of example risk assessments in order to assist with the risk assessment process.  Schools and Services should use these as a framework to develop their own risk assessments to suit the needs of their school or service.

They are not generic risk assessments that you can just put your Department name on and adopt wholesale - that would not satisfy the law - and would not protect people effectively.

Even where the hazards are the same, the control measures you adopt may have to be different from those in the examples to meet the particular conditions in your workplace.

If a woman is expecting or has just had a baby, then some of the tasks that she has previously carried out in the course of her employment may now be potentially hazardous.

A specific work based assessment of all risks to the expectant or new mother has to be carried out as early as possible, for further information please contact the Health, Safety and Environment Office.