A novel approach to assess occupational risks and prevention of hazards: the house of safety & prevention

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-12
Author(s):  
Ulas Cinar ◽  
Selcuk Cebi

Risk management is the key factor to obtain safety in the working environment and its effectiveness increases with accuracy assessment and robust analysis. However, it is hard to succeed because of uncertainties in the working environment. Therefore, there are a lot of risk assessment methods in the literature to assess occupational health and safety risks. The traditional risk assessment methods handle each activity in the working environment separately and they do not consider the interactions among them. Furthermore, in these methods, potential outcomes of the risk parameters are considered based on the most possible outcome although there may be more than one potential outcome. Differ from the traditional methods, The House of Safety method has been proposed to consider all potential outcomes and handle the interactions among the activities. In this study, an extension of The House of Safety is proposed to consider interactions among potential risks and to determine the most effective prevention method based on the potential risks. Hence, this extension provides an evaluation of the whole system. The proposed model has been developed by integrating Fuzzy Inference System (FIS), Fuzzy Analytical Hierarchy Process (FAHP), and DEMATEL into Quality Function Deployment (QFD). In this direction, FIS is used to determine activity-related probabilities, “FAHP” is utilized to identify all possible damage potentials of risks, and the DEMATEL is used to clarify interactions among risks. Finally, all information produced by these methods were aggregated to obtain total risk scores by using QFD. In addition, a second home has been created to link prevention and risks. Therefore, an effective prevention plan has been made to eliminate priority risks with all effective parameters. This stage provides the opportunity for optimum prevention plan against risk or risk groups dominating the system at the same time. In this study, unlike traditional methods including a partial risk assessment perspective, an integrated method that takes into account the risks on their own and the interactions between them is proposed in the literature, and the proposed approach has been applied to an open pit mine.

2020 ◽  
Vol 39 (5) ◽  
pp. 6047-6058
Author(s):  
Ulas Cinar ◽  
Selcuk Cebi

Conventional risk assessment methods are widely used for industrial safety applications. However, there are serious obstacles to their usage as; (i) all of the potential hazards are considered as an independent event, (ii) various risks are identified based on these hazards, (iii) risk magnitudes of these risks are obtained without considering interdependencies among the hazards, and then (iv) the protective measures against the defined risks are taken based on these risk magnitudes. Therefore, conventional methods do not provide any assessment for overall risks in the working environment. Furthermore, although an accident may cause different severity such as loss of working days, loss of limbs, occupational disease, and death, the conventional methods do not consider all potential consequences of any accident, simultaneously. The main objective of this paper is to propose an effective risk assessment approach by using the fuzzy set theory, Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP), Fuzzy Inference System (FIS), and Quality Function Deployment (QFD) methods to quantify the risk of any hazard considering interdependencies among all potential hazards and consequences in working environment. Within the scope of this research, an application in the mining sector has been presented to illustrate the validation and the effectiveness of the proposed approach**.


Mining Revue ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-11
Author(s):  
Mihaela Toderaş

Abstract The mining sector is a particularly important field that has the ability to support the economic development of a country by supplying various mineral products that are used as raw materials in other sectors of activity. When the depth at which a deposit is located and the geological conditions allow, the exploitation of useful mineral substances is realized through open-pit mine. The aim of this paper is to analyze the malfunctions that could occur and cause susceptible incidents and that could have consequences on staff safety and the environment. These malfunctions can have different causes: either an internal origin of the mining unit, or in natural phenomena. In this paper are identified and analyzed the potential mining risks that may occur in the Roşia Poieni open pit mine. The guidelines underlying the identification of these risks took into account three main principles: reducing risks for people, ensuring their security and at the same time limiting the risks on the property, respectively the financial risk for the mining unit. Acknowledge these risks, allows the delimitation of areas that are directly or indirectly exposed to potential risks and the establishment of specific measures for prevention, protection and security regarding the realized activities. Depending on the potential mining risks identified, we have made a hazard map that can be used to develop a risk prevention plan, taking into account the presence of several types of risks that may overlap in the same work area of the quarry.


1984 ◽  
Vol 62 (8) ◽  
pp. 1037-1039 ◽  
Author(s):  
C. A. Franklin

The potential risks to humans resulting from the usage of a pesticide must be carefully assessed before the product is registered. One of the components in the risk assessment is the determination of the amount of pesticide to which the applicator is exposed. Traditional methods estimated dermal exposure by measuring the amount of pesticide deposited on absorbent patches worn on the applicator's body. A more recent approach consists of measuring urinary metabolite levels. A review of data obtained in humans and in rats suggests that the urinary concentration of dimethyl thiophosphate is a good indicator of dermal exposure to azinphos-methyl.


2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Sanghee Lee ◽  
Yoon Jung Chang ◽  
Hyunsoon Cho

Abstract Background Cancer patients’ prognoses are complicated by comorbidities. Prognostic prediction models with inappropriate comorbidity adjustments yield biased survival estimates. However, an appropriate claims-based comorbidity risk assessment method remains unclear. This study aimed to compare methods used to capture comorbidities from claims data and predict non-cancer mortality risks among cancer patients. Methods Data were obtained from the National Health Insurance Service-National Sample Cohort database in Korea; 2979 cancer patients diagnosed in 2006 were considered. Claims-based Charlson Comorbidity Index was evaluated according to the various assessment methods: different periods in washout window, lookback, and claim types. The prevalence of comorbidities and associated non-cancer mortality risks were compared. The Cox proportional hazards models considering left-truncation were used to estimate the non-cancer mortality risks. Results The prevalence of peptic ulcer, the most common comorbidity, ranged from 1.5 to 31.0%, and the proportion of patients with ≥1 comorbidity ranged from 4.5 to 58.4%, depending on the assessment methods. Outpatient claims captured 96.9% of patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease; however, they captured only 65.2% of patients with myocardial infarction. The different assessment methods affected non-cancer mortality risks; for example, the hazard ratios for patients with moderate comorbidity (CCI 3–4) varied from 1.0 (95% CI: 0.6–1.6) to 5.0 (95% CI: 2.7–9.3). Inpatient claims resulted in relatively higher estimates reflective of disease severity. Conclusions The prevalence of comorbidities and associated non-cancer mortality risks varied considerably by the assessment methods. Researchers should understand the complexity of comorbidity assessments in claims-based risk assessment and select an optimal approach.


Parasitology ◽  
1999 ◽  
Vol 117 (7) ◽  
pp. 205-212 ◽  
Author(s):  
C. J. GIBSON ◽  
C. N. HAAS ◽  
J. B. ROSE

Throughout the past decade much research has been directed towards identifying the occurrence, epidemiology, and risks associated with waterborne protozoa. While outbreaks are continually documented, sporadic cases of disease associated with exposure to low levels of waterborne protozoa are of increasing concern. Current methodologies may not be sensitive enough to define these low levels of disease. However, risk assessment methods may be utilised to address these low level contamination events. The purpose of this article is to provide an introduction to microbial risk assessment for waterborne protozoa. Risk assessment is a useful tool for evaluating relative risks and can be used for development of policies to decrease risks. Numerous studies have been published on risk assessment methods for pathogenic protozoa including Cryptosporidium and Giardia. One common notion prevails: microbial risk assessment presents interesting complications to the traditional chemical risk assessment paradigm. Single microbial exposures (non-threshold) are capable of causing symptomatic illness unlike traditional chemical exposures, which require a threshold to be reached. Due to the lack of efficient recovery and detection methods for protozoa, we may be underestimating the occurrence, concentration and distribution of these pathogenic micro-organisms. To better utilize the tool of microbial risk assessment for risk management practices, future research should focus in the area of exposure assessment.


2014 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 82-94 ◽  
Author(s):  
Abdolreza Yazdani-Chamzini

Tunnels are artificial underground spaces that provide a capacity for particular goals such as storage, under-ground transportation, mine development, power and water treatment plants, civil defence. This shows that the tunnel construction is a key activity in developing infrastructure projects. In many situations, tunnelling projects find themselves involved in the situations where unexpected conditions threaten the continuity of the project. Such situations can arise from the prior knowledge limited by the underground unknown conditions. Therefore, a risk analysis that can take into account the uncertainties associated with the underground projects is needed to assess the existing risks and prioritize them for further protective measures and decisions in order to reduce, mitigate and/or even eliminate the risks involved in the project. For this reason, this paper proposes a risk assessment model based on the concepts of fuzzy set theory to evaluate risk events during the tunnel construction operations. To show the effectiveness of the proposed model, the results of the model are compared with those of the conventional risk assessment. The results demonstrate that the fuzzy inference system has a great potential to accurately model such problems.


2014 ◽  
Vol 87 ◽  
pp. 73-76 ◽  
Author(s):  
M. Đurašević ◽  
A. Kandić ◽  
P. Stefanović ◽  
I. Vukanac ◽  
B. Šešlak ◽  
...  

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