We have created some learning content to give you a taste of how of simple Health, Safety & Environmental management can be!
Where does 'Reasonably Practicable' come from?
The term 'Reasonably Practicable' is fundamental in UK Health and Safety law.
It allows those responsible for health and safety to balance the benefits of risk reduction against the time, money and effort required to achieve it.
We've put together various resources for you to help you determine 'what is reasonably practicable'. First off, you can listen to our podcast (top of the page) from Safeti School. Once you've done that, we have a short animation (below) to make sure you have grasped the concept.
Then, if you like, you can read our post for an in-depth example. To wrap us up, we also take a look at some myths around the term 'reasonably practicable'.
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What is Reasonably Practicable? | Animated Tutorial
Still confused about the term reasonably practicable?
Watch our animation video for an overview of the concept of reasonably practicable, before we dive deeper into some real-life examples of how it can be applied.
https://youtu.be/ZUv1kYATYcY
Let's take a look at the term 'Reasonably Practicable' - it forms an integral part of the UK's Health and Safety at Work Act. Let's investigate the legal context of the term first.
In the Health and Safety at Work Act 1974 it simply states that it is the duty of employer's to ensure, as far as is reasonably practicable, the health, safety and welfare of their employee's.
The good news is that because this term is implied into UK legislation, UK employer's are enabled to apply common sense and risk-based approaches toward health and safety management.
How do we decide what is Reasonable?
We need to look at our options and balance the time, cost and effort against the level of risk reduction that we foresee being achieved.
If we can strike the right balance, we can truly add value for both the employee's and for the business.
If we have a low risk, low frequency task. It wouldn't be reasonable to have to spend lots of money on plant and equipment to further reduce what is already a low risk.
On the other hand, if we have a high frequency task that presents a significant risk to our employee/s. It starts to make sense to apply resources toward mitigating that risk.
The expectation is that we try our best to get the risk as low as reasonably practicable (ALARP). OK, but what does this look like in practice?
Reasonably Practicable Example
Let's look at an example to put this theory into some practical context:
Joe, a newly appointed maintenance technician, was getting stuck into a few tasks on his first week at work.
The offices that he was looking after had been without a maintenance or facilities technician for a number of months. As a result, he was asked to go around every air conditioning unit in the building to clean the filters.
As he normally would, he got his stepladder out and started going about removing and cleaning the filters on the air conditioning units.
It was getting near lunchtime and Joe was up the ladder trying to remove a filter on a unit that had been placed a bit higher than the rest. As he couldn't quite get a could grip of it from the level he was working from, he decided to step onto the top plate of the stepladder.
As Joe went to reach toward the unit to get access to the filter, the stepladder wobbled causing Joe to lose his balance. Joe crashed to the ground along with the ladder, res
