What is Job Safety Analysis (JSA) and its Important?

Job Safety Analysis (JSA) is an important to any health and safety program. It is one of many risk assessment tools that can be used in a formal hazard assessment process to identify and control hazard.

what-is-jsa

Many works are injured or killed because they don’t know the right steps or don’t recognize the potential hazard of the job. JSA helps establish proper operating procedures and provide recommendations for preventing or eliminating hazards.  

A job safety analysis should be conducted by a team who is familiar with a task and it should include additional worker, supervisor and specialist. By involving the whole team, the likely hood of missing hazard is reduced. Workers who do the job regularly will recognize unsafe shortcuts or ways to get around protective devices. Therefore, this must be addressed during JSA discussion.

Creating a JSA begins by observing a job. For example, the task is manual lifting of a cross over sub into a basket for transferring to the rig floor. Each step must defined as the part of the operation necessary to advance the work. It is important not to make the steps too general which may result in hazard being missed or too detailed which may result in too many steps. A rule of thumb is to make steps less than 10 steps and also keep the steps in a correct order of operation. Step that is out of order may miss the potential hazards or even introduce hazards that don’t exist initially.

Once all the steps are listed. It is time to identify potential hazard for each step. Hazards are something that can lead to illness, injury, or environmental harm. Health hazard can be physical, chemical, biological or psychological which may cause effect to workers. Safety hazards are substances, processes, actions and conditions that may endanger the immediate workers.

Go through each step and identify potential hazards within that step. Each step may have more than one hazards so number each one with the step number. It is also important to assess the risk for each task and hazard. This can be done by showing the severity of hazard and probability of its occurring. Example of this is to rank the scale of the hazard from low to high or 1 – 5.  Finally, for each step, make recommendation on each hazard can be mitigated or controlled. It is good to make recommendations right away while workers are still focus on the working environment. This way, you will see how the recommendations will work or cause other hazards.

Start from the top of hazard list and work the way down. When making recommendation, you should eliminate hazard or substitute with something less hazard. If it is not possible, make recommendation to control hazard. Hazard controls can include Engineering controls, Administrative controls, or Personal Protective Equipment. Sometimes all types of controls and recommendations can be made. Explore as many as alternative ways possible. If the hazards can be controlled in several ways, each control should be listed. The JSA is not only useful to communicate hazards to the jobs but also form basic of safe work practices and safe job procedures. It also provides step by step training for new employees being taught on how to do the job or if the injury or illness occurs, a JSA can provide a starting point for any investigation and remind employees of safe working procedures. It is important to continually monitoring task and confirms the control is implemented and effective. Conduct JSA for each new task and review them at regular interval or when the change in a task is occurred. When done regularly, JSA helps keep workers safe and reduce the chance of injury, illness and environmental damage.

 

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4 Responses to What is Job Safety Analysis (JSA) and its Important?

  1. Hector Partidas R says:

    “Creating a JSA begins by observing a job”.
    I would prefer saying “Creating a job begins by doing the job”.
    Nobody can recognize hazards better than the person performing the job. What most of them need is someone to coach them and teach how to recognize the hazard and to take the preventive actions. This is their Supervisor’s job or, in extreme cases, an expert in this field that can act as the facilitator for the group. I have seen the Safety Department personnel working on the JSA instead of coaching the workers on how to do it. I start from the premise that people follow the instructions when they are the ones to produce them.

  2. Vara Prasad says:

    Please explain difference between jsa and risk assessment

  3. Alan Hippman says:

    Hello: what you have described here is not a JSA, it’s a TBRA.

    JSAs focus on hazards and protective actions/measures in a job, and are simple assessments. TBRAs focus on the risks and actions/measures to mitigate them.

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