Under the Control of Substances Hazardous to Health (COSHH) Regulations 1999 there is a mandatory requirement for organisations to operate a system of COSHH assessments for any products they use which contain hazardous substances. IMASS Safety Consultants have offered advice, training courses and policy audit since the company’s conception, but have always felt that the support available in terms of software has either been too complex, or does not offer the correct features to allow a client to meet the terms of the regulations. It was for this reason that we have developed the IMASS Technologies COSHH Assessor system.

COSHH Assessor is a simple to use, multi-user system designed to offer an organisation the ability to manage COSHH in as simple a manner as possible. Our standard approach to COSHH has always centred on the production of three documents to be available in the workplace:-

Many organisations simply use copies of a manufacturers data sheet as their COSHH Assessments. However, the COSHH regulations clearly require that a company assess the risk of product use for each work area and for each working practice that it is used. Our system allows simple production of these assessments using an accepted methodology. The COSHH Assessment will typically be held by the Safety Manager within an organisation.

This document is designed to be displayed at a work area to give employees information on how a product should be used, what Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) is to be used, and the associated hazards of use. Using widely accepted graphical symbols, our Safe System of Work document more than meets the requirements of the regulations helping employers to achieve a safer working environment. Importantly, our document omits unnecessary information giving only the information required to carry out their tasks in a safe and responsible manner.

If an incident does occur involving a hazardous substance, then an employer should have documentation available to both first aiders and the emergency or medical services. Our document clearly sets out the harmful properties contained within a product, and how these should be treated in the first instance.
While production of these documents is at the core of the system, these must be supported by a database allowing versioned auditable updates of assessments, logged monitoring of certain components, and a thorough list of components covered by EH40 (the government supplied list of hazardous components).

While the features above are core to the system, there are a number of further features which safety teams will find useful. An example of this is the ability to produce customised reports, for example listing flammable and explosive substances by work area, invaluable when conducting fire risk assessments.

The system comes pre-loaded with EH40, and IMASS can even arrange for all the products you currently use to be added to the system prior to implementation.

COSHH Assessor is a competitively priced package offering a one stop solution to COSHH management. We prefer to offer the product with training not only in it’s use, but in effective COSHH Assessment practices as a whole. Typically we find that the cost of this combined package can be favourably compared to the cost of training alone as offered by other providers.