Risk Assessment Help?

[PixiNanny]

Heyho all

I'm in a real pickle at the moment as my tutor has 'suggested' that I do a risk assessment of a trip to the park with my charges (8yo & 12yo) to cover some of my health and safety bits for unit 2 of CCLD lvl 3 NVQ. I've got a nice long list of things that I think should be covered, but I have no idea how it should be laid out. My Mum (ex-Childminder) can't find her old risk assessments and neither can my Nan (ex CM like Mum) so they are useless today

I was wondering if somebody could link me to a format that is used or can describe (in detail) how I can go about making my notes look like a professional RA?

Thanks!

Hi bromleycma.org.uk is a good website.

Oo, so it is! Thank you I never even thought about what I may need to take with me, I normally carry around phone/plasters just in case but wouldn't have thought to put it on my RA.

Gah, this is actually really hard lol How do CMs do RAs for everything?! I know I'll never have to do it again really as a nanny but doing it for practice is hard enough

Ha you should see my RA folder, I even have one for sticking and glueing!! I can e-mail you what I have I dont mind sharing!! Can we do that here, i am new to mumsnet so dont know the rules

Hi, never done this for a child minder, but do risk assessments for construction sites all the time.

The way we do it, risk is considered to be the "severity" of an event happening, times the likelhood of it happening.

Draw up a table
Call the columns "Event", then "Severity = 1", Severity = 2", Severity = 3; "Likelyhood = 1", "Likelyhood = 2" and "Likleyhood = 3".

In the first column, starting on the second line (ie below the headings i've just given), have a list of all the risks. Eg: "Falling in Pond", "Grazing knee" etc

In the next 3 columns put the whether it is 1 (low), "2" medium or "3" (high) severity scores - the severity of any possible injury. ie: No damage (1), first aid (2), hospital treatment (3).

In the next 3 columns, put the likelyhood "Unlikely (1)", "Possible (3)" and "Likely (3)".

In the final column, put the title "Overall Score". Then go through each "event" and tick a severity and a likely hood. Times their values together to get the final score. So if, for example, you think "grazing knee" has a high likely hood (ie 3) and a low severity (ie 1), then the overall score is 3 x 1 which is 3.

So the top most overall risk will be 3 x 3. so that would be really severe, and the lowest will be 1 x 1.

You need to decided what overall risk is unaccepatble - usually 4 or 5. Anything that reaches those levels you then either decide not to do, or put in mitigation actions (things to do to reduce the risk), and re-assess the risks.

Does that make sense? CAT me if not, and I'll send you an example.

Oh, I've heard of that severity/likelyhood system before, we had that at PGL and loads of the activities were considered high risk unsurprisingly! Some of the risk assessments included things about the staff members being 'incapable' and we were told that was more to do with hung over/drunk staff members more than under-trained lol

How on earth do you decide how severe something is? I mean some things would be seen as more severe than others by different people and for different situations, like obviously I'd have to worry less about my two charges falling into a pond than a CM with under 5's would.

I will speak to my tutor about that one I think and stick with somthing simple for now, as if I speak to her about it then she knows that I am aware of it iyswim? And I think she's asked me to do an RA so that I'm aware of the processes of doing one in case I change careers within the childcare field.

Thank you for the info though, I'm definately rinting off the mock RAs and this info about severity for future reference

This is a good one as well, scroll down to the risk assessments
www.southglos.gov.uk/NR/exeres/16797559-1d91-4110-a118-346a6545d42d

can't get the link to work but if you go on the website and put childminders in the search box then click on the support box

Thank you

Am curious though, why do nannies not usually do RAs? Or the families? Surely RAs would be applicable?