Every organisation has three separate reasons to manage health and safety well: moral, legal, and financial. IOSH Working Safely expects you to know all three and be able to explain them, not just list them.
No one should be hurt, made ill, or killed by going to work. On average across recent years, around 135-140 workers are killed in work-related accidents in Great Britain each year, and around 1.7 million working people suffer from a work-related illness. Beyond the injured or ill person, the ripple effect hits family, friends, and colleagues who witness or deal with the aftermath. This human cost is the moral case: it is simply the right thing to prevent.
In Great Britain the key law is the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974 (HSWA), which places a general duty on employers to ensure, so far as is reasonably practicable, the health, safety and welfare of employees and others affected by their work. The Health and Safety Executive (HSE) enforces this law and can issue improvement notices, prohibition notices, fines, or bring prosecutions. Breaching the law can lead to unlimited fines for organisations and, for serious breaches such as corporate manslaughter, imprisonment for individuals. Employees also have legal duties: to take reasonable care of themselves and others, and to cooperate with their employer on safety.
Accidents cost money, and most of that cost is hidden. Costs split into two types:
A well-known idea here is the 'iceberg' model of accident costs: the visible, insured costs are just the tip of the iceberg, while the uninsured costs beneath the surface are far larger, often estimated at many times the insured cost.
A hazard is anything with the potential to cause harm. This could be a piece of work equipment, a substance, a method of work, or a work environment. Hazards exist whether or not anyone is actually exposed to them right now.
Risk is the likelihood that a hazard will actually cause harm, combined with the severity of that harm if it happens. A simple way to remember it: Risk = Likelihood x Severity. A frayed electrical cable is a hazard; the risk depends on how likely someone is to touch it and how bad the injury would be (a shock versus a fatal electrocution).
IOSH Working Safely places heavy emphasis on this distinction because confusing the two leads to poor decisions. You cannot remove all hazards from a workplace, but you can and must reduce the risk they present. Good safety management is about controlling risk down to an acceptable, tolerable level, not pretending hazards do not exist.
Hazards are often grouped into categories: physical (noise, vibration, extreme temperature), mechanical (moving machine parts), electrical, chemical (COSHH substances), biological, and psychosocial (stress, fatigue, violence). Learn to spot examples from each group, as exam questions often test recognition of hazard type.
A risk only needs managing if it is reasonably foreseeable, meaning a competent person could predict it might happen. Freak, wildly improbable events are not the focus of everyday risk management; realistic, likely scenarios are.
When a question describes a scenario, first identify the hazard (the thing that could cause harm), then separately assess the risk (how likely and how severe). Keeping these two steps distinct is the fastest way to answer correctly under time pressure.
A hazard is anything with the potential to cause harm. Risk is the chance that harm will actually happen, combined with how severe it could be. IOSH Working Safely expects you to recognise the SIX main hazard categories found in most workplaces: physical, mechanical, electrical, chemical, biological, and psychosocial (work-related stress).
When scanning an area, look for Slips/trips, Lifting tasks, Ignition/fire sources, People behaviour, and Tools/equipment condition. This simple sweep catches the majority of everyday hazards.
Organisations improve what they measure. Safety performance is tracked using two types of indicator: lagging and leading. Both are needed for a full picture — relying on one alone gives a false sense of security.
A risk assessment is a careful look at what could cause harm in the workplace, so you can decide if you are doing enough to prevent it. It is not a form-filling exercise for its own sake - it is a thinking process. In UK law it comes from the Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations 1999, which require every employer to carry one out.
IOSH teaches risk assessment as five clear steps:
This is the single most tested distinction on the course.
Getting these two muddled up is the most common exam mistake.
The law says a risk assessment must be 'suitable and sufficient' - it does not need to eliminate every last theoretical risk, but it must be appropriate to the actual work being done and proportionate to the risks involved.
Working safely is not just about people. Poor environmental practice can cause pollution, harm wildlife, damage a company's reputation and lead to heavy fines or prosecution. IOSH links environmental protection directly to good health and safety management, because the same hazards (chemicals, waste, spills) that harm the environment can also harm workers.
Remember the order of preference, from best to worst:
1. Reduce (use less in the first place)
2. Reuse (use items again)
3. Recycle (turn waste into new materials)
4. Recover (get energy from waste, eg incineration with energy recovery)
5. Dispose (landfill, last resort)
This order should guide every decision about handling waste on site.
Everyone at work has a personal responsibility to protect the environment, not just management. Good environmental practice reduces costs, protects the business from prosecution, and protects the wider community and natural world for the future.