Preliminary Hazard Analysis

Preliminary hazard analysis (PHA) is a great tool for beginning to understand the hazards of a system. In some cases, a PHA is all that is needed to analyze a simple system. It is also the first step in the hazard analysis of more complicated systems. This chapter illustrates PHA's use for analyzing a maintenance process/procedure. A PHA seeks to rank hazards in a qualitative measurement of the worst potential consequence resulting either from personnel error, environmental conditions, design inadequacies, procedural deficiencies, and system, subsystem, and component failure or malfunction. PHA is most effectively used during the initial development of a process and the procedures for performing that process. Also, it has utility when updating/changing a process and its procedure. The chapter discusses the injuries that can occur with poor design of infant furniture. It also develops a partial PHA for a proposed piece of infant furniture, a crib, using the PHA technique.