HIRARC Risk Assessment

HIRARC, hazard identification, risk assessment, risk control. Its a common name well known in the safety and health field. What is risk? Risk = likelihood x severity. Likelihood is the chances that an accident would occur. Severity is how serious the effect of the accident to the victim. If both are high, the risk will be high. Below is the guideline from DOSH for risk matrix.

	Severity (S)
Likelihood (L)	1	2	3	4	5
5	5	10	15	20	25
4	4	8	12	16	20
3	3	6	9	12	15
2	2	4	6	8	10
1	1	2	3	4	5

The green zone is consider low risk, the yellow is medium and the red is high risk. If you risk assessment put the risk at high. You better stop the work or process until you find a way to control the risk.

LIKELIHOOD	Description	Rating
Most likely	The most likely results of the hazard / event being realized	5
Possible	Has a good chance of occurring and it not unusual	4
Conceivable	Might be occur at sometime in future	3
Remote	Has not known to occur after many years	2
Inconceivable	Is practically impossible and has never occurred	1
Severity	Description	Rating
Catastrophic	Numerous fatalities, irrecoverable property damage and productivity	5
Fatal	Approximately one single fatality major property damage if hazard is realized	4
Serious	Non-fatal injury, permanent disability	3
Minor	Disabling but not permanent injury	2
Negligible	Minor abrasions, bruises, cuts, first aid type injury	1

One of the common mistake that some people make when assessing the risk is they don't take into account the current control measures and go straight into assessing the risk as there is no control measure in place. The is not right.

For example: for a worker operating a boiler. The likelihood an accident would occur is put 3 or 4. The severity is put 4 or 5. Because we think the boiler is very dangerous and could explode and when it does, there will be fatalities. But when you look into the current control measures like almost all boiler has to be inspected every 15 months by DOSH inspector and service by authorized boiler serving company. Not to mention the monthly maintenance by the owner. All this has reduce the likelihood and severity to 1 or 2 as accident could be slip or fall at the boiler area.

Always take into account the existing control measure when doing your hirarc.