RA :- Job Safety Analysis & Steps For Effective`JSA

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Chapter : Risk Assessment

JOB HAZARD ANALYSIS & STEPS FOR EFFECTIVE JHA

Introduction & Purpose  

Job hazards analysis (JHA) is “a technique that focuses on job tasks as a way to identify hazards before they occur.” So, the basic way to get done job safely are:-

• Break a job down into the various tasks it involves
• Identify hazards associated with each task

Job hazards analysis (JHA) mainly “focuses on the relationship between the worker, the task, the tools, and the work environment.” The goal of JHA is to identify and then control hazards before they do cause harm. 

What’s a Hazard?

A hazard is something that has the potential to cause harm. Typically, this means something that can cause an injury or illness.

JHA document has an excellent appendix that lists various categories of hazards. We’ve duplicated that information for you below.

Difference between JHA and HIRA

JSA (Job Hazard Analysis) focuses on identifying and controlling hazards for specific tasks. It involves breaking down a job into individual steps, assessing each step for potential hazards, and providing specific safety measures to mitigate those hazards. JHA is typically used to ensure that each task is performed safely by addressing the risks associated with each step.

HIRA (Hazard Identification and Risk Assessment), on the other hand, is a comprehensive approach that identifies and evaluates hazards across all activities and processes within a workplace. It assesses the overall risk and prioritizes actions to mitigate those risks, aiming for broader safety management and continuous improvement. HIRA is used to develop a systematic approach to identifying potential hazards and implementing effective control measures to ensure a safe working environment.

Steps For Effective Job Hazard Analysis

Without a solid understanding of the hazards and risks your employees face with the tasks they accomplish each day, it’s impossible to keep them safe. 

 
Effective risk management starts with identifying and addressing hazards before incidents occur. While most safety professionals understand that a thorough job hazard analysis (JHA) is a trusted process for evaluating workplace hazards, the challenges of carrying them out often derail companies from completing them. Furthermore, even when JHAs have been carried out, too often the initial assessments are not revisited or updated as needed to be effective.

Without a solid understanding of the hazards and risks your employees face with the tasks they accomplish each day, it’s impossible to keep them safe. The bottom line is that performing JHAs for each job or process, updating them on a regular basis and providing employees with easy access to their findings is essential to generating greater awareness of safety risks.

Let’s review the critical steps to completing an effective JHA, and discuss the many ways technology can help ease the process.

Step One: Select Which Job to Analyze

To start the JHA process, choose the jobs or tasks that need to be evaluated. Selecting the jobs – or job in some cases – to be analyzed may sound simple, but can be a vital consideration when employers have limited time and resources to analyze all of the various jobs associated with their operations. Another important consideration when picking the job to analyze is that each JHA will require revision with the introduction of new equipment, raw materials, processes or work environments. For these reasons, a good best practice is to prioritize the jobs to be analyzed. This way, even if analysis of all jobs does not occur, it will ensure that the most critical jobs are examined first.
So how do you determine which job or task to evaluate first? A good practice should be prioritized jobs using the following criteria:

• Jobs with the highest injury or illness rates,
• Jobs with the highest potential for injury or illness,
• Jobs in which one simple human error could lead to a severe accident or injury,
• Newly implemented jobs and processes, or ones that have undergone changes in processes and  procedures and Jobs complex enough to require written instructions.

Regardless of the jobs or tasks selected for evaluation, it’s critical to have accurate information about the hazards that workers performing them face. Today, mobile-optimized incident management apps can be a valuable tool for employers to evaluate and prioritize which jobs to analyze. By offering front line workers the ability to report more accurate information and data around hazards, incidents and near misses as they occur, employers more easily can identify areas where immediate analysis needs to take place.

Step Two: Job Task Breakdown

To perform a thorough and accurate JHA, each job must be broken down into a defined sequence of individual tasks. It’s important to avoid defining individual job tasks too narrowly or too broadly. Generally speaking, a job should contain no more than ten individual tasks. If your JSA exceeds this number, consider separating the job into two or more separate phases. It also is vital to maintain the proper sequence of job tasks to ensure that during the hazard identification phase, hazards are addressed in the order they are encountered by employees.
Job task breakdown typically is accomplished through direct observation, with at least one EHS professional or direct supervisor familiar with the job and recording the series of individual tasks as they are performed by an experienced employee. Observation of an experienced employee helps ensure that job tasks are performed in the proper sequence with a high level of precaution, helping to identify unforeseen hazards more easily. This also helps ensure that all tasks, even frequently missed steps like set-up and clean-up, are being reviewed as well. Remember, if a task isn’t identified, risks can’t be identified either.
Once the observation is complete, participants should convene to review the findings and ensure that all steps sufficiently were identified.

Step Three: Identifying Hazards

Hazards should be identified soon after the observation and job task breakdown, while the sequence of job tasks and potential hazards still is fresh in the minds of all participants. If one or more job tasks need to be repeated, it should be done immediately, if possible.
A number of questions should be asked to assess the potential hazards in performing individual job tasks. Proceed through the sequence of job tasks one at a time and answer questions such as:

• Are there any pinch points or potential for body parts to be caught between moving machinery or objects?
• Does the equipment in use present any potential hazards? 
• Is there a potential for slips, trips or falls?
• Is there a risk of injury due to excessive strain from lifting, pushing or pulling?
• Is there a risk of exposure to extreme heat or cold?
• Does the task expose employees to excessive noise or vibration?

Is there potential for exposure to toxic/hazardous substances, harmful radiation or electrical hazards?

This list is by no means exhaustive, and the questions asked should reflect the unique potential hazards and work environments associated with each job. Employees performing the tasks for which the job safety analysis is being conducted should provide input and insight into the hazard identification process, and strive to consider every possible outcome in the performance of each task. Proper controls should then be developed to limit the potential for the job hazards to result in an environmental or safety incident.
This is another area where accurate hazard and injury information is important, and where technology can be a helpful resource. A simple risk analysis solution can help you produce JHAs for any job, and ensure that the risks are communicated to employees and prioritized for mitigation. This software can collect recorded injuries, illnesses, near misses and hazards also makes it faster and easier to identify trends and risk factors. The best systems allow users to create custom reports and dashboards for even greater visibility and identification of critical incident metrics and areas where a new or updated JHA is needed.

Step Four: Develop Preventative Measures

The hierarchy of controls is a well-known and commonly-used tool for developing preventive measures for hazards associated with job tasks. The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health lists the five controls, in order of effectiveness, with the following description:

• Elimination – Physically remove the hazard
• Substitution – Replace the hazard
• Engineering controls – Isolate people from the hazard
• Administration controls – Change the way people work
• PPE – Protect the worker with personal protective equipment

Hazard elimination widely is considered to be the most effective, longest-term solution to improving job safety. However, it also often is the most difficult and expensive in the short term to implement. Administrative controls and PPE measures tend to be less expensive to implement initially, but often are less effective at controlling hazards and can be difficult to sustain in the long term.
There are software solutions that can be integrated with risk analysis and incident management solutions so that preventative measures of all kinds can be planned and tracked to completion. These solutions have the additional advantage of making corrective actions and visible to employees, demonstrating progress on closing action items and improving employee buy-in.

Step Five: Document and Communicate Job Hazard Analysis Findings

After a JHA has been completed, the findings should be documented and made available to employees so that they’re aware of the hazards associated with the jobs they will be performing, and know what preventive measures will help keep them safe. Too often, employers spend the time and effort creating JHAs, only to have the documents disappear into a binder, or get filed onto a computer hard drive and forgotten. When this happens, the JHAs are not fulfilling their purpose. JHAs should be living documents that capture information about risks, document controls and inform the employees about both the hazards in their job tasks and the best means of avoiding them.

Employees need to know JHAs exist, and have quick and easy access to them. Furthermore, workers also need to be able to understand and act on them. It’s a matter of training and ensuring that the JHAs are easy to read and understand. If it’s not clear what hazards correspond to which tasks, or which controls correspond to which tasks, then the JHA fails its primary duty and may not adequately prepare employees to understand and avoid risks. When it comes to communicating hazards, it’s important to remove as much ambiguity as possible.

The importance of effective and well-documented training cannot be emphasized enough. In many situations following a serious accident, questions of liability hinge on the issue of whether training on the JHA was conducted, whether it adequately covered what needed to be covered, and whether the evidence sufficiently backs up your answers to these questions. Training management software assists employers in validating that all training requirements are being met through better visibility and control over all training workflows. By removing much of the guesswork around training needs, today’s software options provide users with greater transparency and insight into schedules and due dates, along with the ability to automate training reminders and follow-ups around noncompliance. With a good training management system in place, employers more easily can run an effective training program, and also demonstrate employee training completion during an audit or inspection.

Step Six: Get Help (If Needed)

Even with the steps to completing a JHA broken down, the reality is that some employers just don’t feel like they have the time or resources to complete them for each job or task. Fortunately, today’s EHS software solutions help simplify the creation, management and implementation of JHAs.

A good electronic risk analysis program makes it easy to develop good assessments and track corrective actions, and when combined with an incident management software solution, you can oversee all aspects of incidents – from reporting to tracking of corrective actions. Often, these programs enable workers to easily report safety incidents and hazards using their mobile devices. Many systems run off a centralized platform available across locations via the cloud, giving workers better access to quickly and easily create risk registers that show the hazards, risk levels, causes and preventative measures associated with any work process. Through the use of these software systems, JHAs can be viewed by employees – even through the use of their mobile devices – giving them better access to hazard and preventive information so they can work safer and more efficiently.

Maintaining a good JHA program is an ongoing and evolving process. If a workplace injury occurs, a review of the relevant JHA should occur to see if it had a shortcoming that may have contributed to the incident. In practice, this reflection doesn’t happen nearly as often as it should, but it’s the only way to ensure that the JHAs are doing everything they can to reduce risk. A good practice is to involve your workforce in a periodic review exercise for existing JHAs to make sure they still accurately capture the job tasks as performed today and address all associated risks.

Better insight into the hazards workers face with their jobs and tasks leads to more effective risk management. By facilitating communication, participation and engagement among everyone involved on the worksite, JHAs offer the opportunity to identify unforeseen hazards and increase support for a stronger, more inclusive safety culture. 

 Hazard Catagory 

Hazards	Hazard Descriptions
Chemical (toxic)	A chemical that exposes a person by absorption through the skin, inhalation, or through the bloodstream that causes illness, disease, or death. The amount of chemical exposure is critical in determining hazardous effects. Check Safety Data Sheets (SDS) and/or for chemical hazard information.
Chemical (flammable)	A chemical that, when exposed to a heat ignition source, results in combustion. Typically, the lower a chemical’s flash point and boiling point, the more flammable the chemical. Check SDS for flammability information.
Chemical (corrosive)	A chemical that, when it comes into contact with skin, metal, or other materials, damages the materials. Acids and bases are examples of corrosives.
Explosion(chemical reaction)	Explosions caused by chemical reactions.
Explosion (over pressurization)	Sudden and violent release of a large amount of gas/energy due to a significant pressure difference, such as rupture in a boiler or compressed gas cylinder.
Electrical (shock/short circuit)	Contact with exposed conductors or a device that is incorrectly or inadvertently grounded, such as when a metal ladder comes into contact with power lines.60Hz alternating current (common house current) is very dangerous because it can stop the heart.
Electrical (fire)	Use of electrical power that results in electrical overheating or arcing to the point of combustion or ignition of flammables, or electrical component damage.
Electrical [static/electrostatic discharge (ESD)]	The moving or rubbing of wool, nylon, other synthetic fibers, and even flowing liquids can generate static electricity. This creates an excess or deficiency of electrons on the surface of material that discharges (spark) to the ground resulting in the ignition of flammables or damage to electronics or the body’s nervous system.
Electrical (loss of power)	Safety-critical equipment failure as a result of loss of power.
Ergonomics (strain)	Damage of tissue due to overexertion (strains and sprains) or repetitive motion.
Ergonomics (human error)	A system design, procedure, or equipment that is tends to lead to human error.(For example, a switch that goes up to turn something off instead of down).
Excavation (collapse)	Soil collapse in a trench or excavation as a result of improper or inadequate shoring. Soil type is critical in determining the hazard likelihood.
Fall (slips and trips)	Conditions that result in falls (impacts) from height or traditional walking surfaces (such as slippery floors, poor housekeeping, uneven walking surfaces, exposed ledges, etc.)
Fire/heat	Temperatures that can cause burns to the skin or damage to other organs. Fires require a heat source, fuel, and oxygen.
Mechanical/vibration (chaffing/fatigue)	Vibration that can cause damage to nerve endings, or material fatigue that results in a safety-critical failure. (Examples are abraded slings and ropes, weakened hoses and belts.)
Mechanical failure	Self explanatory; typically occurs when devices exceed designed capacity or are inadequately maintained.
Mechanical	Skin, muscle, or body part exposed to crushing, caught-between, cutting, tearing, shearing  items or equipment.
Noise	Noise levels (>85 dBA 8 hr TWA) that result in hearing damage or inability to communicate safety-critical information.
Radiation (ionizing)	Alpha, Beta, Gamma, neutral particles, and X-rays that cause injury (tissue damage) by ionization of cellular components.
Radiation (non-ionizing)	Ultraviolet, visible light, infrared, and microwaves that cause injury to tissue by thermal or photochemical means.
Struck-by (mass acceleration)	Accelerated mass that strikes the body causing injury or death. (Examples are falling objects and projectiles.)
Struck against	Injury to a body part as a result of coming into contact of a surface in which action was initiated by the person. (An example is when a screwdriver slips.)
Extreme temperatures (heat/cold)	Temperatures that result in heat stress, exhaustion, or metabolic slow down such as hypothermia.
Visibility	Lack of lighting or obstructed vision that results in an error or other hazard.
Weather conditions (snow/rain/wind/ice)	Self-explanatory.

Benefits of Performing a JHA

Performing JHAs at the workplace should lead to:

• Safer work procedures
• Fewer injuries and illnesses
• Lower injury- and illness-related expenses
• Increased worker productivity
• An increased awareness of how to train employees to perform their jobs safely

For which Jobs JHA should need to be perform?

It’s a good idea to perform a JHA for any job. However, it’s also a good idea to prioritize some jobs ahead of others.

Considering performing JHAs first for jobs that: 

• Have a high injury and illness rate–at your location or in the industry in general
• Have the potential to cause severe injuries and illnesses, even if that’s never happened at your location so far
• Could lead to a severe injury or illness if only one human error occurred
• Are  new to your location
• Have recently changed
• Are complex