Patty's Industrial Hygiene, Hazard Recognition. Группа авторов

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СКАЧАТЬ with the workers who we are morally and ethically required to protect, there is far less information available to effectively assist in communicating risk and achieve the reduction of work‐related exposures to hazards. It is important for EHS disciplines to understand their own strengths and weaknesses. Most spend their entire career developing the skills, knowledge, and abilities necessary for their field practitioner specialties. Their level of success is often built upon performing their roles and responsibilities in an environment where normal communication skills are enough for addressing routine issues and problems. Although EHS staff may be comfortable in their professional duties conversing on more technical topics amongst themselves, the ability to translate this information to the workforce and their management may need development. Communicating risks can become even more complicated when anger, criticism, fear, lack of trust, and other emotionally driven issues become entangled within workplace discussions. It is important for EHS practitioners to understand their innate communication styles. Everyone has strengths and weaknesses within their natural habits for communication and understanding these is an essential component for learning how to change and improve this skillset. This process begins by understanding the pitfalls of risk communication inherent to their discipline and other EHS professions. It is also about learning how to overcome these personal and professional hurdles while remaining competent. Questions must be answered in a language of risk understood by workers, managers, and all potential stakeholders.

      When it comes to effective risk communication the EHS professions are each faced with unique hurdles that are important to address individually. In doing so, a better and more efficient method for understanding one's strengths and weaknesses is very helpful. It is necessary to understand the audience's perception of the communicator's expertise, the potential complexity of the message they are communicating, and how the audience may be affected by the message. In addition, there is the growing population of EHS Generalists that are self‐employed, working with small consulting companies, or working for multinational firms that are increasingly being found to have an amazingly small EHS staff. An increasing number of EHS professionals work for consulting firms that provide broad services to industry and government on a contractual basis. This includes those who work for insurance carriers that provide consulting services to the company's various clients. In some instances, these relationships are stable and allow the development of industry‐specific expertise. In other cases, the EHS practice is broad‐based and varied, not affording professionals the opportunity to strengthen skillsets. Consulting practice presents considerable challenges in risk communication as well, as they may be required to influence internal corporate culture and intervene with stable prevention activities externally from the company. Therefore, many companies are outsourcing EHS responsibilities that include IH, occupational safety (OS), and environmental analyst (EA) functions. Manufacturers may ask their EHS staff to monitor not only the indoor air quality but also the hazardous emissions released into the air and water of surrounding communities. Public health agencies or environmental groups may hire or otherwise call upon EHS professionals to monitor pollutants in community air and water as well. Therefore, it is also essential for EHS Generalists to also understand the risk communication expectations of the individual EHS professions as they are employed to potentially provide this information to workers, to workplace managers, to the public, and to the environmental community.

      2.1 Industrial Hygiene

      The IH profession focuses on the anticipation, recognition, evaluation, and control of hazards that arise in the workplace that can affect the health of workers as well as the community at large. Therefore, the role of the IH in responding to emergencies arising from these workplace hazards and potentially affecting the greater public health is a natural extension of their professional responsibilities. However, the IH role in the identification of hazardous agents goes well beyond emergency response and is primarily focused on their responsibilities to protect the workers as they perform their tasks in a given workplace or across multiple facilities. The identification of potential hazards, the assessment of the work‐related risks, the establishing of the necessary controls, and the management of these risks over time for field IH practitioners span the broad scope of chemical, physical, and biological agents. As part of their assessment of work‐related health risks for a single task can include air sampling for an expanding array of potential chemical exposures, measuring for noise levels of nearby equipment, and acquiring an evaluation of mold spores to address indoor air quality issues. The broad array of professional knowledge to perform these assessments and identify commensurate controls is considered inherent to the extensive educational expectations that are necessary for the qualifications of a practicing IH. A qualified professional will have been given training across a broad cross‐section of scientific areas of expertise, including toxicology, epidemiology, statistics, microbiology, chemistry, physics, biology, engineering controls, monitoring equipment, and more.

An essential component that is often missing from professional IH curriculum is the basics of interpersonal relationships and the communication of their assessment outcomes to the workers they are ethically bound to protect. How does one communicate information derived from white‐collar technical and scientific foundations to a blue‐collar worker? The IH is dedicated to the prevention of work‐related disease and illness that are invariably an outcome of chronic exposures that accumulate over many years or decades. Warning a worker that excessive noise exposures may adversely affect their hearing in the next 20 years if they do not use hearing protection can easily sound like a grandparent's precautionary tale if the message is not delivered correctly. What is the correct method to ensure a worker understands the necessity of consistently using controls related to their profession when the harm may not be immediate or readily apparent and the level of concern amongst their peers is low? This is the most challenging type of risk communication that is all too common for the IH. This drives the necessity of finding a strategy to help workers understand that they must take these risks seriously, often with hazards that are not viewed by the likely apathetic audience in the workplace as an issue or perhaps as a commonly accepted exposure relating to a given task or professional trade. The better‐understood hazards that do not pose a higher risk, which often sets in at a medium level of concern as their impact may be known and are still considered a long‐term issue, can make the IH's risk communication easier. However, emerging new technologies like nanomaterials can cause workers' concern because there is so much unknown about the hazards. Similarly, chemical constituents are continually updated at a pace too rapid to establish occupational exposure limits (OELs), so here too there is often an increased concern that can fill the vacuum of lacking information. The management of this type of risk communication is not common to the IH profession and emerging controversies that can spill out to local communities create difficult issues that the profession must also learn how to handle and discuss with relevant stakeholders (9).

      2.2 Occupational Safety

      Different from IH, which focuses on exposure and control of exposure, OS has accident scenarios and barriers to reduce or eliminate potential accidents. Barriers are to OS as exposure controls are to IH, with examples like fall arrest systems or ground fault circuit interrupters (GFCI) that can both help stop hazardous energy that lead to accident scenarios like falls from heights or electrocution. Safety professionals are also concerned with the full array of potential workplace hazards, however, the profession has traditionally focused on the prevention of traumatic events that can lead to injuries and workplace fatalities. Although historically focused on the prevention of acute traumatic injury, a broader definition includes controlling hazards and the prevention of accidents that protect the workforce while also protecting the general public and the environment. Therefore, the broad discipline of safety deals with the interaction between people and providing the barriers necessary to prevent the acute or chronic outcomes that can adversely impact their well‐being. The discipline of safety is the systematic application of principles drawn from engineering, physics, education, psychology, health, enforcement, and management to prevent harm to people, property, and the environment. The physical aspects of the workplace and their interaction with the worker is an essential part of the safety professional's purview. This includes focusing on preventing potential injuries caused by slips and falls or by being struck by СКАЧАТЬ