Workplace hazards and control measures

Workplace Hazards and Control Measures

Hazards exist in every work place regardless of the activity that each employee carries out throughout a regular work day. Fire safety is crucial in apartment complexes and manufacturing units alike. The health and safety of an employee, for any company should be the top priority. This is due to the fact that the efficiency of work depends on the mental and physical health and workers. When it comes to heavy duty industrial activity, the scale of being prone to hazards goes up a notch. The rigorous work schedules and tasks carried out put employees, no matter how qualified, under substantial risk. The tougher the work environment is the more demanding the chores and the likelier of workplace injuries or negative impacts of exertion wearing off employees. This is why human resource management in industries is heavily stressed upon. Dedicated occupational health and safety experts are assigned various roles from technical to supervision. Trainees are hired to imbibe work place safety regulations enforced by the senior staff. As the profession relies on practical and theoretical knowledge of varying work environments and hazard regulation with in depth awareness of each employee’s personal profile, it takes more than just a few experts to keep an industry running fully. The common objective that each safety expert shares, despite the alteration to their designations, is the administration and control of hazards that could potentially cause a loss to industry resources and workforce. Different types of industries are prone to differing hazards, each requiring qualified professionals to minimize occupational risks while improving efficacy. In this essay, we will run through a list of potential generic workplace hazards and control measures implemented.

The most challenging safety expertise areas include fire and safety, gas and oil, logistics, manufacturing, chemical engineering among others. The varying degrees of hazards call for stringent measures that enforce discipline in work environments and regulate procedures in a way that benefits the overall healthy function of the industry. It is crucial to assume that everything from chain belt manufacturing in a spare parts factory to carrying goods to the nearest port is coherently interdependent. A minor mishap could prove to have fatal consequences on the overall industrial operation. Safety experts must calculate risks and foresee obstacles to smooth industrial operation. There are many ways of categorizing risks and hazards in an industry, depending on the gravity and relevance to industrial activity. Safety experts carefully analyse and calculate each degree of risk to ensure that industries do

not lose out on valuable time and assets. Once a threat is identified, it is assessed and calculated to implement strategies. Many at times, experts calculate every step of industrial activity and potential threats far ahead of time to take measures in accordance and deliver the right results. Qualified safety professionals follow standard set of rules to regulate and implement various measures to minimize risks and hazards.

Control measures and procedures and risk assessment usually are a set of different approaches to situations that pose threats, depending on the magnitude. In some cases, if time permits, risk assessment is done at various stages. A few common hazard control measures are listed below.

1. Eliminate the hazard: Eliminating the hazard isn’t always achievable although in successful cases it does remove hazards completely, thereby eliminating the risk of exposure. One example of such a control measure would be when petrol station attendants in Ireland are no longer unprotected from the risk of chronic lead poisoning following the exclusion of lead from petrol products sold at forecourts.

2. Substitute hazards with a reduced risk: Substituting the hazards might not remove all the hazards linked with the activity or process and may present different hazards but the overall damage or health effects will be reduced. In laboratories during research, toluene is often used as a substitute for benzene nowadays. The solvent-properties of the two are alike although toluene is less poisonous and not considered as a carcinogen while toluene can cause austere neurological harms.

3. Isolate the hazard: Isolating the hazards are accomplished by limiting access to plant and equipment or in case of certain substances, securing them away under stringent controls. When using specific chemicals then an emission cupboard is used to isolate the hazard from the people, similarly assigning noisy equipment in a non-accessible attachment or room divorces the hazard from the person(s).

4. Use engineering controls: Redesigning processes by placing a barrier between people and the hazard or removing the hazard from the person is the effective use of engineering controls. Such processes involve machinery guarding, proximity guarding, extraction systems or eradicating the operator to a remote location far away from the hazard.

5. Use administrative controls: By adopting standard operating procedures or safe work practices or by providing appropriate training, instruction or information that helps reduce the potential of harm/the adverse health effects on people. The isolation and permit to work procedures are examples of administrative controls.

6. Use personal protective equipment: Examples of personal protective equipment (PPE) widely popular are gloves, glasses, earmuffs, aprons, safety footwear, dust masks, all specifically designed to reduce exposure to the threat. PPE is usually implemented in conjunction with one or more of the other control measures and is seen as the last phase of control precautions that reduce risk. An example of the weakness of this control measure is that it is widely recognised that single-use dust masks cannot consistently achieve and maintain an effective face piece-to-face seal, and cannot be adequately fittested and do not offer much, if any real protection against small particulates and may lead to a false sense of security and increase risk. In such cases an extraction system equipped with fitted respirators

may be better where the hazard may have significant health effects from low levels of exposure such as using isooctane containing chemicals.

Precaution is better than cure; the famous phrase that sums up the approach to effective healthcare applies to occupational health and safety as well. It is always smarter to be a step ahead in avoiding risks at the workplace, preventing loss to company property and reducing health effects on employees. This gives weight to the relevance of effective hazard control measures to ensure operation of industrial activity while minimizing risks. The most common reason that leads to many industrial accidents and hazardous situations in a day and age where advanced equipment make almost no room for mishaps are when control measures are misjudged or risk assessment flawed. Thus, the importance of control measures not only prevents hazards but also maintain a healthy environment that in turn provides efficient output of any industrial activity. Qualified safety experts are at the forefront of both analysing hazards and implementing control measures, thereby creating a niche within various industries that cater to the growth of occupational health and safety professions worldwide.