BUREAU VERITAS HONES IN ON HAZOP WITH NEW WHITE PAPER
03/07/2017 Bureau Veritas
As a business committed to raising safety standards for all, Bureau Veritas is providing organisations with greater clarify on risk assessment with the launch of its new white paper 'Reducing the Risk: Maximising the Performance of HAZOP (and similar) Studies'.Despite various health and safety regulation and in-house initiatives, the latest Health & Safety Executive (HSE) statistics1 show workplace injuries still remain relatively high; 30.4 million working days were lost due to work-related illness and workplace injury during the period of 2015/2016.2
As leading consultants committed to helping businesses achieve and maintain a safe and healthy workplace, Bureau Veritas has launched a brand new white paper designed to provide greater clarity on key risk assessment methodologies such as a Hazard and Operability (HAZOP) study.
The paper - written by Fillipe Dobbin Caruso, a Risk & Safety Engineer at Bureau Veritas - explores the challenges of HAZOP implementation and how these can be alleviated with some best practice techniques and examples. The overall aim is to help businesses and organisations to maximise the performance and added value of HAZOP, ensuring it more effectively informs and improves the decision-making process.
Fillipe Dobbin Caruso, Risk & Safety Engineer at Bureau Veritas and author of the white paper comments: "Under the Health and Safety at Work Act 1974, employers must, so far as is reasonably practical, ensure the health and safety of employees and others who have access to their work environment.
"Further regulations, such as the Control of Major Accident Hazards (COMAH), put even more stringent duties upon employers in highly hazardous industries. As part of this, many will invest in a holistic risk assessment methodology such as HAZOP which is generally accepted as best practice for hazard identification and evaluation.
"However, despite the level of knowledge built to date, and even with extensive research and studies into identifying weaknesses and areas for improvements, techniques such as HAZOP still face ordinary challenges common to any risk assessment process. One key issue, for example, can be the sheer volume of information collated in a HAZOP study, rendering it extremely difficult for organisations to process and pay due diligence to every conceivable concern. This, in turn, can make the presentation of results a challenge, in terms of showing them clearly and concisely in a way which brings value to the stakeholders.
"In this way, the paper has been designed to help organisations address these challenges in order to unlock the most value from a HAZOP study.
"While we have made significant groundwork in improving process safety, as well as workplace health and safety in the UK, there is still work to be done and we hope that this latest study may provide a vital resource for organisations. As always, if in doubt, our recommendation would also be to enlist the support of a risk assessment specialist such as Bureau Veritas."
The 'Reducing the Risk: Maximising the Performance of HAZOP (and similar studies) white paper is available to download at: bureauveritas.co.uk/white-papers/hazop-whitepaper
As one of the world's leading health and safety consultants, Bureau Veritas has planned, managed, delivered, and reported hundreds of HAZOP studies in all types of business disciplines throughout the world. Further information can be found here http://bureauveritas.co.uk/home/our-services/risk-safety.
For more information, please contact:
Bureau Veritas
Tel: 0345 600 1828
Web: www.bureauveritas.co.uk
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