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Communication inside Risk Assessment and Risk Management (COMRISK)

01/2018–01/2020

This third-party funded project is conducted in the framework of the BfR research programme on feed safety.

EFSA grant number: GP/EFSA/AFSCO/2017/01-GA05

Project homepage: -

Project description:

“How can we make a risk assessment that helps the risk manager to make an informed decision, balancing risks and benefits associated with feeds and foods without telling him what decision is right?”

This project primarily aims to achieve knowledge exchange between “knowledge sharing” organisations, willing to share and acquire risk assessment capacity in specific scientific domains, thus being a collaborative activity of mutual benefit for the organisations involved. The project will be capacity building as the results from the project will be input in the process of developing the analysis protocols in the participating member states.

Specifically, the goal of the project is to identify current practices and challenges in communication between risk assessors and risk managers and thus increase the understanding of the interaction between risk assessing and risk managing organizations.

In addition to describing the current situation, the project will study how the working processes, analytic tools and formats of reports will affect the usefulness of risk assessments to the risk managers and the ability of the latter to perform informed decision making.

BfR parts of the project:

The work in the project is organized in one “horizontal” work package (WP0 – Project management ) and three “vertical” work packages (WP1-3) focusing on different aspects of risk analysis. The BfR is involved in all WPs and is leading partner of WP2.

WP1 - Risk assessment in current decision making: The aim of this task is to review how risk assessment results are used in decision making by risk managers in the feed and food sector. In order to gain a better understanding of the process, experiences on good practices and challenges are gathered by interviews.

WP2 - Management strategies in risk assessment requests: The aim of WP2 is to review how management strategies are handled in risk assessment requests and how the impact of the strategies is reported to the risk managers.

WP3 - Interaction between risk assessment and risk management. Regulation, policy, agreements, culture & tools: The aim is to identify the preconditions for interaction between risk assessors and risk managers in the process of risk-analysis. The focus is on the communication between actors before, during and after a risk assessment is being conducted.

Project partners:

• National Veterinary Institute (SVA), Sweden (coordination)
• Finnish Food Safety Authority, Finland
• Wageningen University, The Netherland

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