LMRA

The Last Minute Risk Analysis is a short check the worker performs themselves at the workplace, immediately before work begins. They look at their own task, the surroundings and their own condition, and establish whether the situation matches what the work permit and the task risk analysis assumed. If it differs, the work does not go ahead until that is resolved.

Preparation happens at a desk, hours or days earlier. In the meantime reality moves on: scaffolding has appeared that was not there, an adjacent line has been brought into service, the weather has turned. The LMRA is the last moment at which anybody can see that difference.

The LMRA slides easily into a tick-box ritual: a card from the breast pocket, three boxes, done. That is understandable, because somebody who finds no deviation a hundred times stops looking. Effective training therefore aims not at completing the card but at making that habituation visible, and rehearses situations in which the deviation is small and easy to miss.