A Proposed New Venture - Online Risk Assessment for Chemistry Experiments
If you are a teacher of Chemistry, you will know that every experiment must have a risk assessment, so that all hazards (and ways of dealing with them) are clearly identified. The risk assessment can then be passed to any competent teacher (e.g. supply teacher etc), enabling them to carry out the experiment safely.
Risk assessments are a major chore to produce, especially as most schools have a large set of experiments that they routinely carry out. Trying out new experiments is more difficult, as a lot of effort has to be expended preparing the risk assessment before the experiment can go ahead for the first time. ChemRisk will make life simpler, by allowing you to generate risk assessments online, using the ChemRisk database of chemicals with their associated risks and methods of handling them. Some schools have already purchased the risk assessment software (RAGE - Risk Assessment Generator for Experiments) from my ChemSolutions web site, but I intend that ChemRisk should be an entirely online system that will be really simple and cheap to use.
The only obvious downside to this service is that the ChemRisk Database will simply be a tool. If used incorrectly to produce poor risk assessments then ChemRisk cannot be held responsible for the consequences - it will be up to the user to put each assessment together in a way that suits the needs of the user's school. All the information that will be provided has been derived from reputable sources but a lack of errors and omissions cannot be guaranteed. Despite these limitations, in the hands of a trained Chemist, ChemRisk should certainly produce better risk assessments than would be possible without it.
It is my intention that this service should have a very low cost, just a few £'s to make a lot of risk assessments, enough funding to cover my web-hosting costs.
If you would like to register an interest in using this service and, at the same time, motivate me to get it finished more quickly, please send me an email by clicking on the contacts link at the top of the page. If you have any ideas/suggestions/comments that you would like to contribute, I would very much like to hear from you.