64 Occupational Safety Management
of the most commonly used sources for risk assessments include staff interviews,
historical data, models, simulations, and subject matter experts.
Many pieces of data are not known precisely. When an organization has not experi-
enced a particular negative event, it may be oblivious to that risk and loss potential. Itis
crucial that the safety manager follow critical thinking guidelines. The assumptions
and uncertainty in the inputs should be considered in each step of the assessment’s
methodology to determine how they affect the outputs. Uncertainty in the outputs
should then be communicated to the decision maker, as well as the assumptions that
underpin the analysis. It is also useful to consider the impact ...