PERSONAL SAMPLING: THE START OF A NEW ERA?
AUTHORS: SAMANTHA HALL1, ADAM CLARKE1, RICHARD KAYE2, PRAMUKH JAYASEKERA3 AND PAUL KAYE2 1 HEALTH AND SAFETY EXECUTIVE, SCIENCE AND RESEARCH CENTRE, HARPUR HILL, BUXTON, SK17 9JN 2 SCHOOL OF PHYSICS ENGINEERING & COMPUTER SCIENCE, UNIVERSITY OF HERTFORDSHIRE, HATFIELD, AL10 9AB 3 DSTL, PORTON DOWN, SALISBURY, SP4 0JQ Measuring exposure to airborne hazards in the workplace is a common task undertaken by occupational hygienists, yet personal sampling techniques used in the UK have hardly changed in the last 60 years.
head attached by tubing to a pump which, it was suggested, could be ‘worn in the pocket of a laboratory coat or hip pocket of trousers’. This set-up is fundamentally still in use today, although the individual components have advanced.
Jerry Sherwood and Don Greenhalgh were the first to develop practical personal airborne sampling techniques, described in the second volume of the Annals of Occupational Hygiene in 1960 [1]. Their method included a sampling
The limitations of these traditional personal sampling techniques include the bulkiness of the pump, the opportunity for the connecting tubing to snag on items in the workplace, maintenance and costs. The “one day
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survey” is still a common occurrence which presents many challenges for hygienists. Given that the majority of sites only have one survey per year, at most, the hygienist needs to make every second count. Time taken to set up the samplers and calibrate pumps is time that could be spent gathering contextual information, determining similarly exposed groups (SEGs), making observations and talking to workers, which are far more valuable than the exposure result.
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