So now that you’ve identified some of the hazards in your workplace, the question arises – what are the chances that you’re going to be hurt by these hazards? What influences this chance and if you’re hurt, how bad is it going to be? The process of determining how much risk there is, is called risk assessment and controlling that risk is call risk management. For now, we will just focus on risk assessment.

Have you ever defined or measured risk in your biomedical work environment? Have you ever done a risk assessment? If not – why not? Mostly people go to work each day and hope this has been done for them. But when accidents and incidents happen, we often see that a proper risk assessment was not done and proper controls not put in place. This is why you need to be involved – for your own safety.

Risk is “the potential that a hazard with the chosen action or activity, including the choice of inaction will lead to an undesirable outcome”. This implies that your choice of action has influence over the outcome. I’s very important to realize that what you do – the choices you make – influence the risk. For example, your choice to work with the pathogen, how you handle the pathogen, how much PPE you wear, how you wear the PPE, and how you clean up, all influence risk. If it didn’t, we would feel helpless and biorisk management wouldn’t have any place. The whole idea of biorisk management is that we’ve recognized the risks and we’re doing something about it – so we’re making choices. We’re trying to change the amount of risk that we encounter at our work.

As shown in this graphic – risk comes from two areas: 1) the hazards that you’ve got in your laboratory (the biological agents, toxins, etc.); and 2) the situation and the manipulation of that pathogen. If you have one without the other there won’t be any risk.

For example, if you work only with water all day, is there a risk of getting hurt from biological material – probably not. And vice versa, if you have anthrax in your laboratory, but you never work with it, is there a risk of getting hurt? Probably not, because you’re not doing anything with it. These are two extreme examples showing you that you really have to have both (agent and activity).

At this point you may be asking yourselves – how do you do a risk assessment, when do I do a risk assessment, who does them and how often. I would suggest that it’s best to do risk assessments as a team of people that are close to the problem, are most invested in it and understand what’s going on. How do you do risk assessment? I’ll give you one example in the next lesson, which is just one methodology, but there’s many different ways of doing risk assessments.

How often should a risk assessment be done? Most guidance says we should do it initially and then annually or, if there’s anything that changes. For example, major changes in your work environment such as the introduction of a new hazard or procedure. At what level should risk assessments be done? Should they be done on an individual test basis, on an individual laboratory basis or on a facility basis?

The answer depends upon how much time you want to invest in doing risk assessment and how much oversight you need. There is no one, simple and correct answer because it depends upon a number of factors.

The most common approach used in the biomedical field is to do risk assessments on a laboratory-based or functionality-based level. For example, the bacteriology lab, the virology lab, the animal rooms, the operating room or the autopsy area. But, there’s no one simple and right answer. The only way you can do a risk assessment incorrectly is to not do one at all.  I encourage you to get together with your team, think about what level of detail you need and start doing something about assessing the risk.