Occupational risk assessment

The occupational risk assessment is a process designed to identify and locate possible risks to the safety and health of workers and to carry out an assessment of them that allows prioritizing their correction.

The simplest and most common methods assess risks based on their consequences and the probability that they will materialize. Based on this general criterion, different methodologies have been proposed that generally divide consequences and probability into three or more levels. Once these levels are defined, a matrix that relates them is used to determine the magnitude of the risk.

This process is highly subjective. For this reason, a large number of variants have been developed that try to make it more objective. It is common to use checklists and the analysis of accident history to determine the consequences, as well as accident rates to approximate the probability.

Accident investigation: Cause tree, Cause-Effect Diagram, Failure tree, interviews and others.

Tree of causes: The aim is to reconstruct, in the same place where the accident occurred, what circumstances occurred at the time immediately prior to the accident that allowed or made it possible to materialize.

The accident investigator wonders what had to happen for this event to occur?"