Dynamic risk assessment

The continuous assessment a competent person makes as conditions change during a task, deciding whether the planned controls still hold and stopping if they do not; a supplement to the written assessment, not a replacement.

A written risk assessment describes the task as planned. On site the ground is softer than expected, the wind gets up, a delivery arrives early, another trade is working overhead. Dynamic risk assessment is the competent supervisor's and operative's running judgement about whether the planned controls still cover the situation, and the authority to stop work when they do not. It is a skill built on training and experience, and it depends on people knowing the written assessment well enough to see when reality has departed from it.

It has a bad name where it has been used as an excuse for not writing an assessment at all: "we assess dynamically" on a job that could have been planned is a breach, not a method. The proper role is described in the RAMS itself: the conditions under which work stops, who can stop it, and what triggers a re-assessment and a re-brief. A point-of-work risk assessment card, filled in by the gang at the start of the task, is the recorded form of the same idea.

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