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by Dave Smith

A Briefer History of CoSHH Management and Risk Assessment

Upon reading this article you will learn about a brief history of CoSHH, how it applies to you and how you can put in place the necessary actions to prevent your company or your professional image from becoming tarnished or otherwise. It will also give you insight into protection your employees!

CoSHH stands for the Control of Substances Hazardous to Health which is a regulation that applies to every business in the United Kingdom. Some businesses believe that if they have less than five employees? they do not have to abide by the CoSHH regulations, however this is not the case.

Your company will inevitably be using some products that contain substances. These products can be thinners, air fresheners, washing up liquid, lubricants and much much more. If you do use these then you need to adhere to the CoSHH regulations. The reason for this is because you may subject not only your employee but the public to any one of these substances and therefore there MUST be prevention of damage to health put in place.

As a basic example, imagine a decorator who is painting a home working as a sub contractor for a larger enterprise. The decorator mixes white spirits with the paint he is using to help thin the paint before application. This process is something a decorator carries out as an everyday task.

Here are the possible risks to health from this process:

1. Dermatitis caused by the decorator not wearing suitable hand protection (gloves) from white spirits. The Safety Data Sheet for paint may say that it is non-hazardous; however the manufacturer and provider of the SDS did not take into account the use of the thinners and has no legal obligation to do so.

2. The decorator may leave white spirits or paint lying about the home of the customer and this may come into the hands of a child.

3. White spirits is highly flammable and the white spirits or paint solution may become exposed to a naked flame and cause a fire. Does the decorator smoke?

This is why we must risk assessment and in this specific case produce a CoSHH assessment. CoSHH risk assessment is unique and must be treated separately from all other forms of risk assessment that a business would do under the requirements of the Health and Safety at Work Act. This is why chemical risk assessment has its own regulation so that it can be treated as a different animal.

There is no requirement to be qualified to produce a CoSHH assessment. In fact there is no legal quality standard that a CoSHH assessment must follow. The reason for this is because if you have a CoSHH assessment and an accident occurs then is has failed and it wasn’t good enough. Thereafter there will be repercussions the extent of which will be decided on the reasonable controls that where put in place to prevent the incident occurring.

So the premise is that if you produce a CoSHH assessment, you must produce the best CoSHH assessment you can. If you do not you may receive heavy fines both to the company and personally with the potential of imprisonment for severe breaches of the regulation for Directors’ or the offending party.

Remember ignorance will not be tolerated by the Health and Safety Executive! When carrying out compliant CoSHH assessment on behalf of your business you must understand the task that is being performed by the worker and the substance that is being used in the task. You must take into account the environment that the task is carried out in and the reaction of the substance in that environment. I recommend that you at least take a basic risk assessment course so that you can become familiar with assessment. This will help you so understand not only the risk posed but also that control mechanisms that can be put in place as prevention.

If you have many chemicals and many processes that are being carried out DO NOT be tempted to download template assessments from assessment vendors. This is not only frowned upon by the Health and Safety Executive but is a significant risk to the operator who may be carrying out a task differently. The person who produced the assessment you downloaded may not know that the decorator was using white spirits as a thinner or possibly any of the other substances the use during their working day or even at home. This is why the risk assessor must have seen the process, must have spoken with the operator so that all risks can be assessed as they are and not as they are assumed to be.

DO NOT let a simple solution land you with heavy fines, damage the health of your workers or land you behind bars. Either produce your own assessments of bring a health and safety consultant onto your site to carry out the CoSHH assessments.

It is advisable that you find a CoSHH management solution to help control your CoSHH assessments and to remind to you to periodically review each of your assessments. If something in the process changes then a CoSHH assessment needs to be reviewed. If a Safety Data Sheet is updated by a manufacturer then you MUST have the latest copy and you MUST review your CoSHH assessment.

There are service providers out there that will help manage all this for and the requirement to use one of these providers is down to your in house ability to manage CoSHH compliance. CoSHH is a specialist subject to it is advisable that if you don’t know, then ask!

If you have read this article and you do not have CoSHH assessments in place and they have not been provided to your workers, then take it from me that you are doing something very wrong. If you think that your business does not use hazardous substances then think again, even in an office products are used that contain chemicals and you would be surprised what your workers can get up to with them!

The Health and Safety Executive are seldom surprised because they’ve seen it and heard it all before. Did you know that flour dust and poor ventilation led to a school chef developing severe asthma? No? Well you probably wouldn’t have thought of that unless you’d carried out an assessment and this claim would have cost you £200,000 in compensation.

So, please think again, do you really use hazardous substances?

COSHH, which stands for the Control of Substances Hazardous to Health, is the set of regulations that aims specifically to address the health issues of using hazardous substances in the workplace with its primary aim being to prevent ill health. COSHH covers the vast majority of substances and mixtures of substances, used or produced in the workplace that are potentially hazardous to health. The program covers the following areas: * How Hazardous Substances can hurt us * Classification and Symbols as per the Chemicals Hazard Information and Packaging for Supply Regulations (CHIP) * Substances covered by COSHH * What COSHH does not cover * The Requirements of COSHH Identification and assessment Precautions Monitoring exposure Health surveillance Information, Training and Supervision Arrangements on how to deal with accidents, incidents and emergencies that may occur COSHH supplies us with access to knowledge about hazardous substances that we use. Combining this knowledge with established safe work procedures is the best way we can avoid accidents, injuries and illnesses associated with the use of hazardous substances. RUNNING TIME: 17 Minutes

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