Risk Assessment

As we all know, sometimes in life shit happens and there's nothing you can do about it except go home and cry into your family-sized tub of Ben&Jerry's (all hail). But what if shit happens when you're on a job? Well we've already talked about insurance and health & safety, but another helpful (and tedious) thing that fits into that bag of fun is making a risk assessment.

A risk assessment is basically a paper version of that girl in the horror movies who points out absolutely everything that could possibly go wrong but then does it anyway. 

The aim of a risk assessment is to find any and every possible health & safety hazard, or anything that could happen to make the day run less than smoothly, and then plan a way to combat them. Basically, you're planning for a worst case senario and then making sure you've got everything covered so you can save the day if it happens. 

Every school/college/uni/work trip you've ever been on has been risk assessed. It's an integral part of event organisation and health & safety just can't be overlooked, really.

So how do I make a risk assessment?
Well, dear reader, the first step is to identify the following factors:

• the type and scale of the event
• the type and size of the audience
• the location of the event
• the time, date and duration of the event

 Once you've identified these factors, you can start to determine a safety plan.

There are tonnes of examples and templates online and I've chosen to use a template from the Health and Safety Executive website to create my risk assessment for a facepaint at a school fete.