Risk Assessment

Conservation Volunteers Australia (CVA), with the support of the Australian Government Natural Heritage Trust, has developed a Risk Assessment Handbook that is a must for anyone involved in Landcare type activities.  The Handbook is free and can be downloaded after completing a brief survey.  Click here to access the handbook.

The Handbook highlights the importance of risk assessment and contains a Project Risk Assessment Form that all groups are encouraged to use.  The handbook also contains a Hazard Identification Checklist that helps volunteers identify potential risks associated with working outdoors. 

The following is an extract from the handbook:

So what is risk assessment?

Essentially, risk assessment is no more that a careful consideration of how people could be injured or in some other way harmed by the work you plan to undertake, and deciding what steps you should take to prevent that harm from occurring.

Why worry about risk assessment?

Risk assessment aims to eliminate, or at least minimise, injury to the people directly or indirectly involved in an activity. For a community group, those people are your members, friends, family and neighbours.  No-one wants to be or feel responsible for harming people or causing damage to the property of others.  Risk assessment is about protecting the safety of people and property.

In fact, risk assessment is a legal requirement for employers, and we all owe to others a common law duty of care.  Therefore any group or club that encourages or facilitates the involvement of people in activity is obliged to take reasonable steps to prevent reasonably foreseeable injury, loss or damage.  Risk assessment helps us meet our duty of care obligation and therefore provides a level of legal protection.

Who can do the risk assessment?

Anyone can do the risk assessment.  Legally it is the responsibility of the body or person organising the activity on behalf of the group and the person managing the site on the day of the activity that must control the risk management process.
The most effective risk assessment process is one that involves everyone who will participate in the activity. It is important that someone takes the lead in facilitating the process but everyone should have the opportunity to contribute to the process and feel a sense of ownership of, and commitment to, the risk control strategies identified as necessary.

Do we need to document the risk assessment?

If your risk assessment process, written down or not, enables your activity to proceed successfully without harm to anyone, then it has achieved its primary objective.

There are however some advantages in recording the key aspects of your risk assessment. 

• We are less likely to forget to do things that are written down
• We can regularly review and revise what we have written
• People are generally more likely to commit to actions that are written down
• A written risk assessment can be shown to new volunteers or late arrivals
• A completed risk assessment form is useful to look back on when you next undertake a similar activity

Writing down what you do will help to demonstrate that you have met your duty of care obligations in the event of a claim against you
Your risk assessment form does not need to be complicated; just a simple record of the precautions you are taking.

Landcare Illawarra thanks CVA for allowing us to reproduce extracts from  'Risk Assessment Handbook' produced by Conservation Volunteers Australia with the support of the Australian Government Natural Heritage Trust in the interest of volunteer safety.