A COSHH assessment is not a filed safety data sheet. It is a judgement about what happens when your people use that substance, in your process, at your quantities.
A COSHH assessment is the assessment UK employers must make of health risks from hazardous substances at work, under the Control of Substances Hazardous to Health Regulations. It covers far more than the obvious chemicals: dusts, fumes, vapours, mists, gases, biological agents and substances generated by a process — welding fume, wood dust, flour, silica from cutting — count too, and the process-generated ones are where the serious long-term harm usually is.
The commonest failure is filing the supplier’s safety data sheet and calling it done. The sheet describes the substance; the assessment describes the task. Two people using the same solvent, one wiping a small part in a ventilated bay and one spraying a large surface in a confined space, are in completely different situations, and only the second half of that sentence is your responsibility to write.
Reaching for gloves and a mask is the fastest way to close an assessment and the least effective control there is: it depends on correct selection, correct fitting, correct use every single time, and it fails silently. Elimination and substitution — a different product, a different method, a lower concentration — remove the problem; local exhaust ventilation removes the exposure at source. Where respiratory protection is genuinely necessary, face-fit testing and a maintenance regime are part of the control, not optional extras, and an assessment that specifies a mask without either has not finished the job.
Assess the task, not the cupboard. A list of every substance on site with a hazard classification against each is an inventory, and it is the document most often produced instead of an assessment. The regulator is asking what your people do with them.
Assessments are reviewed when the process, the substance, the quantities or the people change, and periodically otherwise — and they only work if the people doing the task have read them. Ettex Forms captures the assessment at the workplace with photographs of the actual set-up, Ettex Docs holds the written assessments with version history so the one in force at a given date is recoverable, and Ettex Records tracks the review dates, the health surveillance record and the face-fit tests alongside the safety data sheet management library that feeds it.
To be clear: this is not health and safety advice and not a substitute for competent assistance. Exposure limits, health surveillance triggers and what counts as adequate control are technical questions, and for anything involving carcinogens, sensitisers or process-generated dust and fume they are questions for an occupational hygienist.
An assessment of the health risks from hazardous substances arising from work activities, covering the task and the people exposed, and the controls needed — not merely a record of the substance.
No. The sheet is supplier information about the substance and is an input to the assessment. The assessment concerns how the substance is used in your workplace.
Yes. Substances generated by a process — welding fume, wood and silica dust, flour — are covered, and they account for much of the serious long-term ill health.
Whenever the substance, process, quantities or people change, after any incident, and periodically otherwise. Set a review date on every assessment rather than relying on someone noticing.
A DVIR is the driver’s record of a vehicle inspection. Enforcement rarely turns on the form itself — it turns on whether the defect somebody wrote down was ever repaired and certified.
A food safety management system is the whole apparatus — prerequisites, procedures, records, training and review. The HACCP plan is one part of it, and the part people mistake for the whole.
Most training budgets are spent on courses somebody asked for. A needs analysis asks a different question first — what performance is missing, and is training even the thing that would fix it?