PLATE 03 OF 20
Risk assessment.
How hazards are identified, risks are evaluated, and protective measures are chosen and verified.
Pillar guide
Machinery risk assessment: from hazard to evidence: Use risk assessment to inform design, then connect protective measures to verification and instructions.
Supporting guides
| Guide | What it covers |
|---|---|
| Defining machine limits before assessment | Use, misuse, people, tasks, and lifecycle phases defined before hazards are listed, so the assessment covers real exposure. |
| Identifying hazards systematically | Hazard records that name the source, the person exposed, and the circumstances, instead of a single broad label. |
| Estimating and evaluating risk | Methods for estimation, the assumptions behind them, and why a matrix score is not a compliance result. |
| The risk reduction order in practice | Inherently safe design first, then safeguards, then information for residual risk, applied in that order. |
| Residual risk and information for use | What remains after design and safeguards, and how instructions must carry it honestly to the user. |
| Verifying protective measures | Verification evidence that shows the measure working, with configuration, criteria, and results, not a restated requirement. |
| When a risk assessment must be reviewed | Design changes, new information, incidents, and new uses that each trigger a review, and what the review must record. |
| Reasonably foreseeable misuse | Misuse that can be foreseen from the machine, its users, and its setting, and how it differs from abuse or sabotage. |
| Risk across the machine lifecycle | Installation, adjustment, cleaning, maintenance, and decommissioning each expose different people to different hazards. |
| Risk assessment and harmonised standards | How standards support risk assessment without replacing it, and what a listed standard does not prove. |
| Who does a risk assessment | Competence, roles, and records for an assessment team, and why outsourcing a report does not transfer responsibility. |