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A Methodology for Harmonizing Safety and Health Scales in Occupational Risk Assessment
Successful implementation of Health and Safety (H&S) systems requires an effective mechanism to assess risk. Existing methods focus primarily on measuring the safety aspect; the risk of an accident is determined based on the product of severity of consequence and likelihood of the incident arisi...
Autores principales: | , , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
MDPI
2021
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8125366/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/34062816 http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/ijerph18094849 |
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author | Ji, Zuzhen Pons, Dirk Pearse, John |
author_facet | Ji, Zuzhen Pons, Dirk Pearse, John |
author_sort | Ji, Zuzhen |
collection | PubMed |
description | Successful implementation of Health and Safety (H&S) systems requires an effective mechanism to assess risk. Existing methods focus primarily on measuring the safety aspect; the risk of an accident is determined based on the product of severity of consequence and likelihood of the incident arising. The health component, i.e., chronic harm, is more difficult to assess. Partially, this is due to both consequences and the likelihood of health issues, which may be indeterminate. There is a need to develop a quantitative risk measurement for H&S risk management and with better representation for chronic health issues. The present paper has approached this from a different direction, by adopting a public health perspective of quality of life. We have then changed the risk assessment process to accommodate this. This was then applied to a case study. The case study showed that merely including the chronic harm scales appeared to be sufficient to elicit a more detailed consideration of hazards for chronic harm. This suggests that people are not insensitive to chronic harm hazards, but benefit from having a framework in which to communicate them. A method has been devised to harmonize safety and harm risk assessments. The result was a comprehensive risk assessment method with consideration of safety accidents and chronic health issues. This has the potential to benefit industry by making chronic harm more visible and hence more preventable. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-8125366 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2021 |
publisher | MDPI |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-81253662021-05-17 A Methodology for Harmonizing Safety and Health Scales in Occupational Risk Assessment Ji, Zuzhen Pons, Dirk Pearse, John Int J Environ Res Public Health Article Successful implementation of Health and Safety (H&S) systems requires an effective mechanism to assess risk. Existing methods focus primarily on measuring the safety aspect; the risk of an accident is determined based on the product of severity of consequence and likelihood of the incident arising. The health component, i.e., chronic harm, is more difficult to assess. Partially, this is due to both consequences and the likelihood of health issues, which may be indeterminate. There is a need to develop a quantitative risk measurement for H&S risk management and with better representation for chronic health issues. The present paper has approached this from a different direction, by adopting a public health perspective of quality of life. We have then changed the risk assessment process to accommodate this. This was then applied to a case study. The case study showed that merely including the chronic harm scales appeared to be sufficient to elicit a more detailed consideration of hazards for chronic harm. This suggests that people are not insensitive to chronic harm hazards, but benefit from having a framework in which to communicate them. A method has been devised to harmonize safety and harm risk assessments. The result was a comprehensive risk assessment method with consideration of safety accidents and chronic health issues. This has the potential to benefit industry by making chronic harm more visible and hence more preventable. MDPI 2021-05-01 /pmc/articles/PMC8125366/ /pubmed/34062816 http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/ijerph18094849 Text en © 2021 by the authors. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). |
spellingShingle | Article Ji, Zuzhen Pons, Dirk Pearse, John A Methodology for Harmonizing Safety and Health Scales in Occupational Risk Assessment |
title | A Methodology for Harmonizing Safety and Health Scales in Occupational Risk Assessment |
title_full | A Methodology for Harmonizing Safety and Health Scales in Occupational Risk Assessment |
title_fullStr | A Methodology for Harmonizing Safety and Health Scales in Occupational Risk Assessment |
title_full_unstemmed | A Methodology for Harmonizing Safety and Health Scales in Occupational Risk Assessment |
title_short | A Methodology for Harmonizing Safety and Health Scales in Occupational Risk Assessment |
title_sort | methodology for harmonizing safety and health scales in occupational risk assessment |
topic | Article |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8125366/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/34062816 http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/ijerph18094849 |
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