L1 Topic 1: Introduction to Hazards

Hi! Welcome to the online version of safety risk management training. This is training I've been delivering face-to-face for a number of years, and I've finally decided to put it online. So, welcome!

The underlying principle of the training that I deliver is based on simplicity, and I find that people get more engaged in safety if they understand what's actually going on with it. What's it about? So, I use pictures extensively. We'll look at some pictures over the next few slides, and then after every three or four slides, I'll get you to do an activity just to demonstrate that you've built some understanding from what I've been talking about.

So, let's get on with this. Cool, so let's get started.

One of the first activities that I do in the classroom sessions is I get people in pairs to draw a picture of safety. I ask them, "Come on, give you two minutes, draw a picture of safety." And I get all sorts of interesting responses from people.

The first thing that people tend to do is think, "How do I draw a picture of safety?" And then they sit down and settle on a few things, and it can go one of two different ways. One, well, one of three different ways.

One of the ways that it goes is people start to draw stick figures, and then they often put a smiley face on the stick figure. A happy person is a safe person. They then get a bit inspired and say, "Well, actually, let's draw another stick person and then let's draw some little stick people, and then let's put the little stick people in front of a house. People get home safely. That's what safety is. Get home safe every day. We've all heard that term. That's sort of what safety is."

Another group of people take a slightly different tack, and they tend to focus on drawing objects rather than people. So we get people drawing traffic cones, lots and lots of traffic cones, and then maybe they'll expand and draw some signs. No walking, hazardous substances, electrical energy. So, we've got two different groups of people here: the people that focus on the safety aspect in terms of people, but then we've also got people that focus on the objects of safety.

Then there's a third group that sort of combines the two, and that's when we get people drawing images of other people with PPE on – safety hat, high-vis. So, when I get people to draw safety, they draw all sorts of different things. And this highlights a problem that we've got with safety – nobody can really pin down what it is. Everything that's drawn on this screen is to do with safety, but it's not really the essence of safety. It's not really what safety is.

So, the question is, can we draw a picture of safety that encompasses it all? And I think we can. So, here we go with what I believe to be a picture of safety. I think it's the best way to explain what safety is that captures the essence of it rather than just objects around what safety could be or what is involved in safety. It's called the energy model.

Now, the first part of the energy model is understanding that we're trying to stop victims. We're trying to stop people from getting hurt. That's the primary responsibility of everybody in safety – to stop people from getting hurt. Now, what we know about people getting hurt is that the hurt is often caused by an energy source. Yeah, so an energy source is some form of energy that can hit the person and cause them harm.

And the energy model explains that quite clearly – that all harm to people is due to some sort of energy. And we can talk more about this in some of the later modules. But fundamentally, if you touch electricity, which is an energy source, you get hurt. And this works for nearly all sorts of workplace accidents. So, we have energy sources in workplaces we want to stop from getting potential victims. So, what do we do, really simply?

We put a barrier between the two. If there's something between the potential victim and the energy source, then we no longer have a victim. The victim is just a potential victim. Yeah, understanding this principle is really, really key to what we're trying to achieve in safety. There's bad things out there. We put things between us and our workers and the bad things, and then safety happens. It's quite simple.

So, let's have a look at a different example. Oh, this was by Gibson and Haden in 1980. I always like to reference people's work that I use. So, here's a different version of the same model. We still got a potential victim there. In this case, the energy source is a saw blade. In order to stop the saw blade causing a potential victim, we put some guarding in place. If the guarding is in place, the blade doesn't cause a potential victim. And this is really the essence of safety. This is really what we're talking about. Cool.

Now, even though in the energy model, if the wording focuses on a barrier, the reality is that can mean many other things. It's anything that's going to stop the hazard or the energy causing the potential victim to become a victim. So, in this case, we've got a toxic substance that's bubbling out of the bottle. The potential victim, we don't want one of them. So, what could exist in the middle instead of a barrier? What do we do? We just put a lid on the bottle.

This is how simple safety could be. As long as we know what the different bits of it are, it's quite easy. If you see a bottle that's leaking stuff, you know to put a lid on it. That's what safety is. It shouldn't be about writing tons of procedures. It should be about doing things. So, hopefully, this has given you a relatively simple understanding of what we're trying to achieve in safety. A little bit more complexity over the next few slides, but don't be scared. It's okay.

Okay, so let's build on this a little bit further. We've got the simple energy model – energy source, barrier, potential victim. If we know what the energy sources are, we can put barriers in place to stop the victims. It's a simple, really simple concept. We're just going to add a little bit more complexity to make it more safety-ish. So, what we're going to do to start with is we're going to look at the energy source.

Now, instead of talking about the energy source because people get scared of physics, we're going to talk about two different terms: the term hazard and the term activity. Yeah, so the hazard is effectively the energy source. The hazard is the thing that causes you harm. We'll talk more about that in detail in a moment. And the activity is what you or the person is doing that puts them at risk of being exposed to that hazard. Instead of talking about barriers, sorry, we're going to talk about controls. Barrier means barrier, really.

Yeah, in safety, we talk about a whole range of different things. So, we tend to use the word control. And instead of talking about victims, we're going to, again, talk about two terms. We're going to talk about the term outcome and the term harm. So, if we've got a hazard and we're doing an activity and we don't want a bad outcome – someone to get hurt – then we put a control in place and it stops one leading to the other. That again is the essence of safety. So, we'll just work through and we'll just look at each one of these in a little bit more detail over the next few slides.

Right, so we're going to break this down into each stage. So, we're going to look initially at the hazard and the activity box. Remember, this replaces the energy source, and it's important that we understand what we're talking about throughout this whole process.

So, a hazard is best thought of as the thing that causes harm. It's the thing that hurts you, and sometimes you've got to think quite hard about what that is. But it's a thing you can nearly always take a photograph of, and it's nearly always written as one word. If you start writing big sentences about your hazard, it's probably not a hazard. The activity is really important in this process.

The activity is the thing that's being done that could put a person in contact with the hazard. So, for example, the hazard could be a chemical. Can a chemical hurt you? Yes, it can. What's the activity? Using the chemical – decanting the chemical, mixing the chemical. Understanding the nature of the hazard and the activity that's being done is incredibly important. So, let's just look at a few examples.

Hazard: Machinery. Activity: Operating machinery. Can machinery hurt you? Yes, it can. When you're operating machinery, are you at risk of being exposed to machinery? Yes, you are, absolutely. So, it's a hazard, and that's the activity.

Chemicals – I've already touched on this. Chemicals can hurt you. Chemicals are a hazard. The activity that you're doing is mixing chemicals. When you're mixing chemicals, are chemicals a hazard? Absolutely, they are.

Mobile plant – forklifts, whatever other mobile plant you've got on your sites. Can it hurt you? Yes, absolutely, it can. What's the activity? It could be operating mobile plant. It could be other things. It could be working close to moving mobile plant. That would be a different activity because the controls are going to be different.

And finally, sound – is sound a hazard? Absolutely, it is. What's the activity? Working in a noisy environment or working with noisy equipment. Understanding the nature of what we're doing, the nature of the hazard, and the nature of the activity that's causing the exposure is really, really important. None of this is complicated, and we've got to keep it as simple as we can.