Understanding hazards
Grouping hazards so you can spot them
Hazards are easier to find if you look for families of them. Mechanical hazards include moving machinery, entanglement, cutting, impact and falling objects. Physical hazards include noise, vibration, electricity, heat, cold, pressure, radiation and slips and trips. Chemical hazards (corrosives, sensitisers, solvents, dusts) are managed under COSHH principles. Biological hazards include bacteria, viruses, moulds and sharps. Ergonomic hazards come from manual handling, repetitive work, awkward posture and display screen equipment. Psychosocial hazards include work-related stress, bullying, violence and fatigue.
A useful mental model is source - pathway - receptor: a noise source, a route through the air to a person's ear. Controls work by breaking any part of that chain. For noise, the pattern repeats the hierarchy: reduce noise at source, enclose or damp it, limit time exposed through rotas, and use hearing protection last. Health hazards such as noise, dust and vibration cause harm slowly and may never produce a reportable accident, which is why they are so often missed.
For manual handling, the sequence is avoid, assess, reduce, and the assessment prompt TILE - Task, Individual, Load, Environment.
Traps: treating a hazard as a risk; assuming hazards are always physical and visible; forgetting health hazards because they produce no dramatic incident; listing a hazard category ('chemicals') without naming the actual agent and the harm it causes.
Rule of thumb: for each hazard, state what harm it causes and who is exposed. If you cannot answer both, you have not finished identifying it.