The Process of Occupational Risk Assessment

Jacob John, Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences, Bahria University, Islamabad, Pakistan, Email: jacob@gmail.com

Received: 26-Sep-2022, Manuscript No. JENVOH-22-81853; Editor assigned: 29-Sep-2022, Pre QC No. JENVOH-22-81853 (PQ); Reviewed: 14-Oct-2022, QC No. JENVOH-22-81853; Revised: 20-Oct-2022, Manuscript No. JENVOH-22-81853 (R); Published: 28-Oct-2022

Description

An appraisal of the possible risk a hazard to a person in the job poses is known as an occupational risk assessment. The assessment considers potential outcomes as well as the likelihood of them occurring and the results. Safety hazards (those that can result in injury), chemicals, biological, physical, and ergonomic hazards are the five categories of risks to be aware of.

Risks in the workplace might have very detrimental effects. When a person is regularly exposed to the same dangers, it can be very deadly. Hazards must first be recognized, and their severity must be determined, in order to protect employees. This information is provided by occupational risk assessments, enabling the establishment of safe level upper and lower bounds. The wellbeing of employees is safeguarded by maintaining suitable standards. The National Institute for Occupational Health and Safety is a public health agency in the United States that does occupational risk evaluations (NIOSH). Although these analyses frequently concentrate on chemicals, they are helpful in examining other risks.

Process

There are two steps that must be taken in order to access dangers properly. First, there needs to be an “exposure assessment” that gauges the incidence and intensity of worker contact. Second, a “risk characterization” that gauges the likelihood and gravity of any potential health problems must be created. The health risk associated with various exposure doses is then roughly calculated using the information gathered. The intention is to prevent any employee from having a functional or health impairment.

An occupational risk assessment starts with the identification of a hazard, which is a situation, an event, or a behaviour that has the potential to cause harm through an accident or disease. Any risk that an employee may encounter at work is a risk. However, hazard identification involves more than just being aware of potential risks. It’s important to understand the effects and who might be at risk. The conditions that influence the effect and the uncertainty factors must all be known in order to predict safe levels effectively.

The dose-response analysis is an important component of a risk assessment; here dose-response relationship indicates the size of an organism’s response in relation to exposure to a stimulus or stressor (often a chemical) following a specific exposure period. This assessment ascertains the relationship between the worker’s absorption of the substance in question and its results. Finding the point of departure, or the amount of the chemical that has little to no effect, is the goal of the second step of the risk assessment. Statisticians must create models to estimate the PoD using both epidemiological and toxicological data. Data mistakes and choosing the right model to utilise are two things that frequently make this work challenging. A sensitivity analysis is carried out to reduce mistake. These consider additional risk assessment strategies, any shortcomings, and any presumptions that may have been made. Occupational risk assessments must be conducted using probability in a rational, cogent manner because they are merely estimates. The risk assessments must exercise prudence to find a safe level that strikes an equilibrium between an estimate that is too high and one that is too low due to the introduction of assumptions and differentiated data. Comprehensive studies are essential to achieving this goal and must be transparent, clear, consistent, and reasonable while also matching the assessment’s goals.

Copyright: © 2022 The Authors. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial ShareAlike 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/). This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.