Risk Matrix Assessment - How to Use | Severity and Likelihood | Step 3 | Risk Assessment

Try our Risk Assessment Course - https://safeti.com/courses/risk-asses... Assess the Risk using a Severity and Likelihood - How to use a Risk Matrix Watch our video lesson to help you understand how to use a risk matrix assessment to assess risk. This step in the risk assessment process is vitally important – you have identify the significant hazards, now it’s time to assess the risk. A common method of assessing the level of risk is to assign a value to each of two component parts – Likelihood and Severity. As explained in the video and shown on the risk matrix below, a combination of Severity x Likelihood = Risk. As shown in the risk matrix, the number chosen for each element (Likelihood and Severity) represents a level of significance e.g. high, medium or low. Severity – How bad is the outcome likely to be i.e. the severity of injury or illness? Likelihood – What are the chances of it happening with the current controls in place? Example of a Risk Matrix Using a risk matrix for your workplace risk assessment allows you to look at each hazard separately and decide how significant the risk might be. The example above is a basic ‘Risk Matrix’ – it is quite simple, but of course that makes it easy to interpret and it does just fine for most applications. You may find matrices that are much more detailed or complex, but they usually work along the same principles. It’s important to note, that the intention of a risk matrix is not to provide a specific, ‘quantitative’ measurement of risk. We aren’t ‘measuring’ anything physically. It does, however, allow the assessor to prioritise according to the perceived risk level. It’s up to us to decide the following for each hazard or work activity: Likelihood (1-3) – how likely an accident it is that someone will come to harm. Severity (1-3) – the seriousness of the potential injury or illness Firstly, the Likelihood should be determined. We must decide which of the following best reflects the chance of the outcome happening – Very Likely (3), Possible (2) or Unlikely (1) Once we’ve taken a note of that, we need to look at Severity. How severe would the outcome be if the worst was to happen? – Major Injury (3), Minor Injury (2) or Trivial (1) When we have assigned a number to both Likelihood and Severity, we can then multiply them to produce our ‘risk rating’. As you can see, the risk matrix does this for you. It also provides a traffic light colour to make interpretation of the results even easier. Let’s look at an health and safety risk assessment example to explain a little further…