by Jbs112009 a3 — November 25, 2009—At the close of its two-year-long Healthy Workplaces Campaign on risk assessment, the European Agency for Safety and Health at Work (EU-OSHA) announced preliminary results of the European Survey of Enterprises on New and Emerging Risks (ESENER), looking particularly at the numbers of organizations of various sizes that carry out risk assessments.
The survey shows that despite the legal obligation to carry out regular risk assessments, between 10 and 15 percent of enterprises having between 10 and 50 employees still do not carry out a risk assessment, or even a more informal “workplace check.”
The survey also highlights that the smaller the establishments are, the more likely they are to outsource a risk assessment to a service provider. In fact, 40 percent of small enterprises (10-19 employees) contract an external service provider, compared to only 17 percent of large enterprises (250 to 499 employees). In the EU-27 over a third (36 percent) contract out their risk assessment, and there are large differences between countries, according to the report.
