CATEGORIES OF RISKS AND THEIR DEFINITIONS MADE SIMPLE FOR ENVIRONMENTAL HEALTH RISK MANAGERS

Environmental Health officers are trained in risk management that is known in safety as Environmental Health Risks or Health risk (but professionally known in as nuisances)

To ensure that environmental health risks are kept to a minimum, they carry out routine inspections, monitoring and evaluation of the sanitation and hygiene standards of the environment on daily basis. This is aimed at achieving disease prevention, prolonging life, promoting health/safety and hygiene at work place, residences and the society at large. .

However, Environmental Health Officers need to be able to think outside the box so as to understand contemporary environmental health risk and Safety management and in relation to modern day health and safety techniques, strategies and certification.

To achieve the foregoing, let EHOAN in collaboration with EHORECON, vigorously push for more Training, retraining, development and capacity building of the Environmental Health officers so that they can compete favourably with their counterparts in other climes and industry. Foreign training can never be over emphasised for serving Environmental Health Officers, to bring them in line with modern environmental health practice.

Also, EHOAN and EHORECON should form lasting synergy with the National Industrial Safety Council of Nigeria (NISCN) , Institute of Safety professionals of Nigeria (ISPN) and the Chartered Institute of Environmental Health, London to help the profession leap forward with the right right kind of certification after training.

Concerted efforts should be made to ensure that standard Safety courses should be introduced into the training curriculum of Environmental Health officers across the country. Such that graduating students would pass out with international safety certification like NEBOSH etc along side WAHEB and other relevant certifications. This will properly position the Environmental Health officer better, in the labour market of today that is very competitive.

Having said that, let us share some tips and definitions in Risk management.

Risk Management is “the process of identifying, analyzing, and responding to risk factors .
There are some risk categories that should interest the environmental health officer. These includes:
 
1. RESIDUAL RISK

Residual risk is the threat that remains after all efforts to identify and eliminate Risk have been made. It is the risk level that remains after additional controls are applied. 
Residual risks are best described as the leftover risks, the minor risks that remain. They are those risks that are expected to remain after the planned response of risk has been taken, as well as those that have been deliberately accepted.

Residual risks are acceptable to most organization’s risk tolerance level.

2.  SPECULATIVE RISK

Speculative risk is a category of risk that can be taken on voluntarily and will either result in a profit or loss. 

All speculative risks are undertaken as a result of a conscious choice. Almost all financial investment activities are examples of speculative risk, because such ventures ultimately result in an unknown amount of success or failure.

Speculative risk can be contracted with pure risk, a category of risk in which the only possible outcome is loss. 

3.  PURE RISK (ABSOLUTE RISK)

Pure risk, also called absolute risk, is a category of threat that is beyond human control and has only one possible outcome if it occurs: loss. Pure risk includes such incidents as natural disasters, fire or untimely death.

4.  OPERATIONAL RISK

Operational risk is the prospect of loss resulting from inadequate or failed procedures, systems or policies. 

• Employee errors

• Systems failures

• Fraud or other criminal activity

• Any event that disrupts business processes.

Most organizations accept that their people and processes will inherently incur errors and contribute to ineffective operations. In evaluating operational risk, practical remedial steps should be emphasized in order to eliminate exposures and ensure successful responses. Poor operational risk management can hurt an organization's reputation and cause financial damage. How much loss an organization is prepared to accept, combined with the cost of correcting those errors, determines the organization's Risk Appetite. 

In Risk Management, Risk Appetite is the level of risk an organization is prepared to accept.

Organizations sometimes express their Risk appetite through the creation of a Risk Appetite statement, a document that helps guide organizational risk management activities.

5.  COMPLIANCE RISK

Compliance risk is exposure to legal penalties, financial forfeiture and material loss an organization faces when it fails to act in accordance with industry laws and regulations, internal policies or prescribed best practices. 

Compliance Risk is also sometimes known as integrity risk. 
Many compliance regulations are enacted to ensure that organizations operate fairly and ethically.
For that reason, Compliance Risk is also known as integrity risk.

SECONDARY RISK
These are those risks that arise as a direct outcome of implementing a risk response. In other words, you identify a risk and have a response plan in place to deal with that risk. Once this plan is implemented, the new risk that may arise from the implementation: that’s a secondary risk. 

-EHSadvisor