10 Proactive Hazard Identification Methods

Here are a few examples of methods you could adopt to identify health and safety hazards before an incident occurs:

• conducting pre-start discussions on the work to be carried out;
• encouraging workers to recognize and highlight hazards while performing work;
• carrying out safety inspections and audits of the workplace and work procedures;
• conducting job safety analyses (or similar task evaluation processes);
• monitoring, measuring and testing the working environment such as noise monitoring, electrical testing and atmospheric testing;
• analyzing proposed new or modified plant, material, process or structure;
• conducting hazard (or risk) surveys;
• reviewing product information, e.g. safety data sheets, operating manuals; and
• researching publicly available data on hazards, e.g. newspaper articles, industry or safety regulator alerts; and
• looking at past incident and near-miss reports.

Remember that a workplace is any place that a worker carries out a work task for your business so even when your workers are offsite or travelling for example, you need to be sure that they are not exposed to health and safety risks.