Use of expert elicitation in the field of occupational hygiene: Comparison of expert and observed data distributions

The concept of professional judgement underpins the way in which an occupational hygienist assesses an exposure problem. Despite the importance placed on professional judgement in the discipline, a method of assessment to characterise accuracy has not been available. In this paper, we assess the professional judgement of four occupational hygienists (‘experts’) when completing exposure assessments on a range of airborne contaminants across a number of job roles within a surface mining environment in the Pilbara region of Western Australia. The job roles assessed were project driller, mobile equipment operator, fixed plant maintainer, and drill and blast operator. The contaminants of interest were respirable crystalline silica, respirable dust, and inhalable dust. The novel approach of eliciting exposure estimates focusing on contaminant concentration and attribution of an exposure standard estimate was used. The majority of the elicited values were highly skewed; therefore, a scaled Beta distribution were fitted. These elicited fitted distributions were then compared to measured data distributions, the results of which had been collected as part of an occupational hygiene program assessing full-shift exposures to the same contaminants and job roles assessed by the experts. Our findings suggest that the participating experts within this study tended to overestimate exposures. In addition, the participating experts were more accurate at estimating percentage of an exposure standard than contaminant concentration. We demonstrate that this elicitation approach and the encoding methodology contained within can be applied to assess accuracy of exposure judgements which will impact on worker protection and occupational health outcomes.