Haztek provide health risk assessment services for manufacturing, construction, mining, maritime, commerce and education industries.
Health risk assessments are conducted by our highly qualified and experienced Hygiene Consultants to ensure your organisation’s control programs are adequate and effective. Our comprehensive health hazard risk assessment will identify the possible hazards to the workforce, as well as evaluate existing controls and identify the need for additional control programs.
Our Approach to Health Risk Assessments
Our occupational hygiene consultants conduct health risk assessments for most workplace chemicals and agents including:
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Emphasis is placed on ensuring that the strategies developed are practical, can be readily implemented and will be owned and understood by operational personnel
Strategy for Health Risk Assessments
We have a legal requirement to protect all workers of visitors to our sites or premises from occupational illness or injury. To maintain competiveness it is essential that this is achieved through an effective and efficient program. Risk assessments need to be conducted systematically to deliver real and lasting benefits to worker health.
The American Industrial Hygiene Association (AIHA) Strategies for Assessing and Managing Occupational Exposures prescribes a methodology which when adopted provides a systematic and cost-effective program for assessing workplace exposures. This program has been adopted for use in the Australian work environment through the Australian Institute of Occupational Hygienist (AIOH) Simplified Occupational Hygiene Risk Management Strategies Guidelines. The guideline has been developed to meet Safework Australia’s requirements. This approach has been adopted as a cost effective mechanisms for achieving compliance by numerous Australian organisations.
A 5 step approach is outlined, the steps can be summarised as:
- Health Hazard Identification;
- Establishing Similar Exposure Groups;
- Health Hazard Risk;
- Health Monitoring Program;
- Workplace Monitoring Program.
Health Risk Identification
Health risk identification is the first step to develop an occupational hygiene program. This process will develop a list of the stressors that the workforce is potentially exposed to. These will be under the categories of Chemical (Solvents, Pesticides), Physical (Vibration, Heat, Noise), Biological (Mould) and Ergonomic. The health risk identification needs to be conducted in consultation with operational staff, the process usually involves:
- Consultation with area representatives including; Managers, WHS Officers, Operators and WHS representatives;
- A review of the materials/chemicals and their material safety data sheets (MSDS);
- A review of the process, including exposure scenarios e.g. the tracking of trace amounts of highly toxic substances;
- A walk-through survey, and consultation with operational personnel regarding processes, equipment, materials used, physical environment, products / by-products, etc.;
- A review of documented monitoring or information from similar types of assessments;
- A review of reported incidents.
Establishing Similar Exposure Groups
The next step is to establish Similar Exposure Groups. A Similar Exposure Group (SEG) is a group of people having the same general exposure profiles because of the similarity and frequency of the tasks they perform and materials and process with which they work. A properly defined SEG provides the ability to use data from a relatively small sample of the exposure population to predict the likely chronic health exposures of the group as a whole.
Health Risk Assessment
Assessments involve qualitative and semi-quantitative risk assessments that are performed to identify potential exposures that require inclusion in the monitoring program. This is a risk management process to establish the priority exposures for further review and uses surrogate data, modelling and the judgment of the hygienist, engineers, managers and operators. Resources for health surveillance and workplace monitoring can then be focused on the priority areas where further information is required to define exposures.
Our occupational hygiene consultants can assist in the conduct of a baseline health hazard analysis for you workplace.
For information on air monitoring click here.
For further information on how we can assist you with health risk assessment services call our office or use our contacts page to forward a request for further information.
