How Might You Use The Risk Scenario Concept In Your Organisation?

We’re reaching out to organisations to share their comments on the value of the Risk Scenario concept to help us in our work to create a knowledge base to help designers manage health and safety risks more effectively and in a collaborative way: The Construction Risk Library.

What insights do you think will be provided by looking at data in this way?

The Construction Risk Library contains relationships between two concepts, each  consisting of data organised in a structured way: risk scenarios and risk treatments. Both of these concepts are described in a new report.

Discovering Safety is actively exploring ways of using this data, and looking to provide a tool to analyse and visualise the data held in the Construction Risk Library CSV database. If this data can be used to improve risk management in design, not only will this contribute to driving down the annual toll of harm and suffering to workers and members of the public who are affected negatively by the UK Construction Industry, but it will also help prevent an even larger scale of losses associated with waste, loss, and rework. Design for Safety is a great idea for health and safety, but it is also an effective strategy to reduce waste and improve productivity.

The question of how to describe and manage design risk is at the heart of The Construction Risk Library Project. 3D models are very powerful in communicating the immediate context of a risk, and in enhancing the conversations that construction professionals can have about preventing accidents. But to manage the risks they do need to be identified, coded and tracked until they can be adequately treated. The Construction Risk Library has worked on the first part of this problem by identifying ‘Risk Scenarios’. These are a description of a risk in a given context, where the context and the risk can be described by six data points. Gordon Crick, HSE HM Inspector and lead of the Construction Risk Library project, with Carlos Arturo Osorio Sandoval of Nottingham University and Zane Ulhaq of Atkins, has produced a position paper for Discovering Safety, called Risk Scenarios and Digital Design in Construction, which sets out the development of this concept and how it can be used in construction design and management. A link to the paper is provided at the bottom of this article on our Construction Risk Library LinkedIn page.

The final part of the paper describes how we have carried out a study of risk scenarios identified from a series of HSE Press Releases. These provide accounts of accidents and incidents which ended up in Court. This is admittedly a skewed set of data, but it does provide insight on risk priorities which have been associated with the most serious health and safety failings.

Please do get in touch with us using the comments below or by emailing discoveringsafety@hse.gov.uk to let us know how this project can benefit your organisation, or challenges that you have. Your experiences will help us to build an informed and useful knowledge base and tool. By making contact with us we can offer advice and assistance that we hope will benefit your work and ensure that you are the first to know of new tools and knowledge created by the programme.