Manchester Particle Physics Group

Risk Assessments and Safety Information

This web page summarises the School policy on risk assessments and contains links to all risk assessments associated with current projects in the Particle Physics group.

Group Safety Officers:

Jo Pater Joleen.Pater AT manchester.ac.uk
Stefano de Capua Stefano.deCapua AT manchester.ac.uk

Risk Assessment Policy and Preparation

If you are a PI or academic supervisor of research staff or students, you are responsible for ensuring that risk assessments are produced for all work under your control, and that they are "suitable and sufficient". Jo Pater, Nicola Hutchings and Alan Wardle can assist with this, but you have to take ownership of the document by signing it as the assessor. JP, NH or AW then countersign it to confirm its suitability as a risk assessment, but not to comment on the scientific consideration of any hazards. This responsibility cannot be devolved, but you can involve others, such as SEOs, EOs & RAs, in the risk assessment process.

Some information and potentially useful tools from Manchester University on the preparation of risk assessments can be downloaded here:

Risk Management and Risk Assessments - key principles
Guidance note on the Role of Generic and Dynamic Risk Assessments
Risk assessment FAQs
A blank risk assessment form
A blank risk assessment form with attached guidance notes
If your experimental work involves chemicals, a separate chemical risk assessment should be carried out using this form which should be appended to the main risk assessment.
If your work requires overnight and/or long-term unattended running of experimental equipment, you must provide an overnight running permit; instructions and a blank form are here.

Assessments should be reviewed annually, or more frequently if there are any significant changes required. If no changes are necessary, they should be re-dated to indicate that they have in fact been reviewed.

All risk assessments for a lab/area should be kept in a visible location in the lab.

Once a risk assessment has been approved, it should be communicated to anyone who may be affected by that work; it is recommended that these people sign an attached form to indicate that they have taken note of the assessment and any associated local operating rules.

Risk Assessments for Current Projects

All links are Risk Assessments unless otherwise indicated.

General Equipment found in most labs:

Radioactive Sources (Schuster 5th Floor) - NB this section is obsolete and will be updated soon to reflect new University rules JRP May 2019

Anyone who needs to work with radioactive sources must become familiar with the following material:

Once the potential user is familiar with all of the above, he or she must contact Jo Pater to register as an authorised user. Only then is unsupervised work with the sources permitted.

Further information: