The Play Safety Forum and Health and Safety Executive: Recommended formats for Risk-Benefit Assessment and Risk Assessment

The Play Safety Forum and the Health and Safety Executive have each recently published their recommended formats for Risk-Benefit Assessment and Risk Assessment respectively.

The HSE document is no longer called 5 Five Steps to Risk Assessment, and no longer uses the four columns approach that was so confusing and unhelpful for ‘more complicated risks’ such as children’s play or adventure activities. Its now called Risk Assessment: a brief guide to managing risk in the workplace.  However, it still uses the same five steps:
https://www.hse.gov.uk/pubns/indg163.htm

The Play Safety Forum document is written by David Ball, Tim Gill and Bernard Spiegal, the authors of Managing Risk in Play provision: an implementation guide, the second edition of which was published in 2012.  It comes as a Worked Example and a Blank Form.

For the Worked Example see:
https://timrgill.files.wordpress.com/2014/11/psf-risk-benefit-assessment-form-worked-example-final.pdf

For the Blank Form extract from Tim’s blog at:
https://rethinkingchildhood.com/2014/11/12/rba-risk-benefit-assessment-form-launch/#more-4399

The two formats are now compatible – so you can use the Risk-Benefit approach and still satisfy the recommendation in the HSE guidance.