From hazard assessment to an issued permit

Three registers work together to authorise a single piece of high-risk work: a Hazard & Risk Register entry identifies and scores the risk, a Safe Work Procedure defines the approved method for doing the work safely, and a Permit to Work authorises a specific instance of that work at a specific place and time — linking directly to the exact hazard and procedure records it relies on.

Each of these three registers is useful on its own, but the real safety value comes from the permit being forced to point at real, existing hazard and procedure records rather than a text description of them. A permit issuer opening an issued permit can always open the exact hazard assessment and the exact approved procedure it was issued against — not whatever version of either happened to be current when someone last remembered to check.

The usual order is: a hazard is identified and scored first (likelihood × severity, producing a risk band); a Safe Work Procedure is written and approved for the task the hazard relates to; and only then is a Permit to Work created, using its relational pickers to link the specific hazard and procedure records. Nothing in the product enforces this order — a permit's hazard and procedure links are both optional, and can be added, changed, or cleared on the permit at any time, independent of the hazard's or procedure's own status.

Once a permit is issued and later closed, the hazard and procedure it referenced are unaffected — their own statuses and content don't change as a result of a permit's lifecycle, and a hazard or procedure can be linked from any number of permits over time. If the hazard's risk score or the procedure's approved version changes after a permit was issued, the previously issued permit still shows the record as it was linked (a reference to the record's identity, not a snapshot of its content at issue time) — reviewing whether an already-issued permit needs to be reconsidered after such a change is a manual judgement call, not something the system flags.

Do I have to create records in this order? No — the pickers on a Permit to Work simply resolve against whatever hazard and procedure records currently exist; nothing blocks creating them in a different order or leaving either link empty.