Importance of risk management

Risks and hazards

Risk – this is the probability combined with the severity that a particular characteristic of a product will cause injury.

Hazard – the risk of injury arises from product characteristics, and these characteristics are called hazards. Any feature of a product which has the potential to cause injury in certain circumstances is a hazard.

Risk management

• Hazard elimination. If a hazard is not there, then it cannot cause injury.
• Risk mitigation. Some hazards cannot be eliminated because they are integral to the product, and in these cases, the appropriate approach is to design the product so that the probability it will cause injury is reduced.
• Product warnings. Some product hazards cannot be eliminated by design, or their probability of causing injury sufficiently reduced. The two steps of either elimination or mitigating must be fully explored before a warning can be considered an effective way of managing the risks.

Different product types have different types of hazards – for example, what is considered a hazard for a toy, would not necessarily be a hazard for an electrical product. This is because different people use products in different ways.  Some features of a product (such as electricity) are hazards on their own if the product does not adequately protect against contact with it. Many hazards are obvious, but often there are hidden hazards that require a deeper consideration.

Toy example

Toys provide an excellent example of risk management in action. Any parent or carer knows that small children put everything they can get hold of into their mouths, and anything which is small enough to fit into their mouth can also be swallowed or drawn into the child’s throat.

One way to manage this is to make toys for small children which have no small parts at all. Another solution is to ensure that small parts cannot be detached from the toy, and thus infants would not be able to swallow these parts.

Many toys for older children need small parts to operate (board games or model kits for example) and may still be attractive to younger children. The hazard cannot be eliminated, or the risk mitigated, so in this case, adding a warning – that the toy is not suitable for children under 36 months and should be kept out of their reach – must be provided on the product or on the packaging.

Legislation and standards

European product safety legislation seeks to limit risks by specifying essential safety requirements for many products. This is what product standards consist of – a way of identifying and quantifying product hazards. In most cases, it will outline the way in which risk should be managed to ensure that the product is safe.

Harmonised standards ensure that all product hazards have been addressed, which is why compliance with standards offers a presumption of safety.

Harmonised standards are covered in another module on the SPEAC Academy.