Health & Safety 39
To Measure Or Not To Measure - That is the Question!
‘Elf and Safety’ (H&S) gets something of a bad press these days with the most benign of activities being banned by allegedly over-zealous people. This is unfortunately driven as a response to the ‘where there’s blame there’s a claim’ culture that has emerged over the last few years.
Casella Measurement’s vision is one of an integrated bodily worn system that conceptually allows remote monitoring of relevant agents via a local network or indeed the internet.
ASSESSMENT TYPE AREA MONITORING
DOSIMETRY PROFILING
Low
Specific data not documented
Unobserved WSM/Area Samples COST
However, when it comes to the workplace it is a different matter. The International Labour Organisation (ILO) report that some 160 million people worldwide suffer from occupational related diseases, with over 2 million deaths attributed annually as a result. These figures don’t include countless fatal or serious injuries caused by accidents, which makes working seemingly a risky business.
Risk is all about combining the likelihood of something happening with the severity of that occurrence and it is an assessment of that risk which drives measures to remove or mitigate the potential root cause. It’s worth making a distinction between safety and health issues early on. Safety is associated with short term, potentially life-threatening issues like exposure to gas (with a risk of explosion or asphyxiation) or heatstroke due to a combination of high temperature and humidity, for example. Health issues on the other hand can be caused by relatively longer term accumulated exposure to agents like noise, vibration, dust and chemicals, the latter two particularly leading to the premature deaths mentioned by the ILO.
Author Details:
Tim Turney, Market Manager, Casella Measurement
Address: Regent House,
Wolseley Road, Kempston, Bedford, MK42 7JY, UK
Tel: +44 (0)1234 844133
Fax: +44 (0)1234 841490 Email:
timturney@casellameasurement.com Web:
www.casellameasurement.com
Many organisations are now implementing an Occupational Health and Safety Management System (OHSMS) as part of their risk management strategy to address changing legislation and protect their workforce. An OHSMS promotes a safe and healthy working environment by providing a framework that allows the organisation to consistently identify and control its health and safety risks, reduce the potential for accidents, aid legislative compliance and improve overall performance. Standards like BS OHSAS 18001 can be adopted by those wishing to implement a formal procedure to reduce the risks associated with health and safety in the working environment for employees, customers and the general public.
An adage cited during a sales conference keynote speech by a CEO was “you can’t manage what you don’t measure”.
It’s probably timely then to pause and reflect on the term ‘measure’, which according to the dictionary means “determining size or quantity as ascertained or ascertainable by measuring” and to make a distinction at this juncture with ‘monitoring’ “to observe, supervise, and keep under review for the purpose of regulation or control”.
In more complex scenarios than Casella’s post room, measurement then often features as a tool in the risk
www.envirotech-online.com AET Annual Buyers’ Guide 2012
Documentation Level Medium
Targeted Hybrid High
Bay to bay (noise) map Assign area measurements to risk groups
Statistically valid Task Based Source: Phase To Inc
assessment process but with a plethora of physical & chemical agents to deal with it can be a daunting task. David S. Cmar and John A. Rioux in their web article1
Choosing the right noise exposure assessment tool
state that the chosen strategy depends on many circumstances and the matrix reproduced below summarises the available tools for noise exposure assessment (but this equally applies to agents other than noise).
They go on to say that “the matrix shows a complex relationship between assessment types and documentation levels and how these relate to real-world issues such as cost and complexity” going on to argue that “none of the methods describes in the chart above can be characterised as good or bad; they can all be equally effective if applied for the correct purpose.” Area monitoring refers to the use of a hand held (sound level) meter, whilst (noise) dosimetry allows a bodily worn instrument to measure across a full shift (FS), which can be targeted at certain ‘mobile’ workers and is a good compromise in terms of cost and complexity. According to an article in Safety +Health2
, the task based
(TB) concept revolves around creating a detailed breakdown of the various elements a person typically would perform and then calculating an exposure. This means making assumptions about the tasks performed and typical time ‘on task(s)’ combined with a noise level based on a sample of each individual task. It is easy to see why this approach is both costly and complex but as one might expect software packages exist to help the process.
COMPLEXITY
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