Ccontamination risks are a hot topic in the industry at the moment, particularly looking at various ways of designing out potential risks, whether that risk represents a possible danger to the product or to personnel or, as is the case with nanotechnology, the extent of the hazard is as yet unknown.
Risk is something that we are all aware of, but often we fail to consider that it applies to us at any given moment. This is partly because in life we have to take risks every day: crossing the road, taking an aeroplane, or working in a production environment. We subconsciously perform a risk analysis to weigh up the probability of something happening, the likely consequences and what we can sensibly do to avoid the hazard. But the fact that accidents continue to happen means that we don’t always get it right.
One of the issues is that the complexity of the interconnected systems we increasingly rely on has far outstripped our capability to readily communicate them to others, and while one person in an organisation may understand the risk of one particular action, another person from a different department may not.
Over the years, many companies and safety consultants in various industries have come up with ways of explaining, documenting and formulating risk analysis; more latterly, these are being adopted by quality control, health and safety and facility design and engineering departments and – in some cases – regulators. But these models are far from perfect and while they can prompt analysis and identify weaknesses they are by no means a replacement for the years of experience and knowhow that an experienced production engineer, microbiologist or quality control team may have.
The arguments surrounding risk analysis can be controversial and will, we hope, stimulate discussions as to whether such models should merely be tools used in the classroom or become part of laid-down procedures.