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

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.

Risk management in local micro-enterprises

Risk management within the microenterprise implies the identification of future impacts, as well as anticipating the negative impacts to face effects that make the production process impossible, so that from this, actions are designed to eliminate the possibility of the risk occurring . Hence the importance derives since with the design of prevention actions and with the implementation of this, by the workers themselves it is feasible to avoid its occurrence, in order to achieve safer work spaces. The research was carried out in a local carpentry workshop whose objective is: to design an Occupational Risk Prevention Plan. Method used: and carried out the risk assessment, key risk factors were identified, to later define the appropriate preventive measures and the management of the business training plan. This research contributed to the design of a plan fully adapted to the productive characteristics of the company, which responds to more specific situations and that can be implemented during the working day, to achieve the sustainability of the organization by obtaining workspace cleaner and safer.