Injury measurement

Knockout" mouse models Types of renal injury Measurement of injury Proximal vs. distal tubular injury The isolated perfused rat kidney... 

Injuries that result in light duty are not deemed lost time, and supported fractures are not considered lost time either—both are in fact lost time according to the industry s rules on injury measurement, which follow ANSI Z16. 

Overemphasizing results (injury measurements). In numbers-oriented companies, when the results are not achieved the tendency is to find someone to blame (McSween, 1998, p. 47). 

Because work in extreme cold presents a potential health hazard, workers and supervisors involved with work in cold environments should be well informed. Each must know about the symptoms of cold strain and cold injury, measures of environmental conditions, proper clothing habits, safe work practices, physical fitness requirements for work in the cold, and anergency procedures in case of cold injury. 

Management and Employee Cooperation. Before beginning to collect data, the cooperation of the managers involved, including the first line supervisor, and of the workers should be secured. Management needs to be informed so that they can be confident that surveillance activities will not upset production or lead to injuries. Workers need to know what the valuation means to them and how the results are to be reported. Everyone needs to know how the measurement is to be conducted so that the actual measurement causes as Htde dismption as possible. 

Medical Programs. Large chemical plants have at least one hill-time physician who is at the plant five days a week and on call at all other times. Smaller plants either have part-time physicians or take injured employees to a nearby hospital or clinic by arrangement with the company compensation-insurance carrier. When part-time physicians or outside medical services are used, there is Httle opportunity for medical personnel to become familiar with plant operations or to assist in improving the health aspects of plant work. Therefore, it is essential that chemical-ha2ards manuals and procedures, which highlight symptoms and methods of treatment, be developed. A hill-time industrial physician should devote a substantial amount of time to becoming familiar with the plant, its processes, and the materials employed. Such education enables the physician to be better prepared to treat injuries and illnesses and to advise on preventive measures. 

Chemical Pathology. Also referred to as clinical chemistry, this monitoring procedure involves the measurement of the concentration of certain materials in the blood, or of certain enzyme activities in semm or plasma. A variety of methods exist that allow (to variable degrees of specificity) the definition of a particular organ or tissue injury, the nature of the injurious process, and the severity of the effect (76). 

Ha2ard is the likelihood that the known toxicity of a material will be exhibited under specific conditions of use. It follows that the toxicity of a material, ie, its potential to produce injury, is but one of many considerations to be taken into account in assessment procedures with respect to defining ha2ard. The following are equally important factors that need to be considered physicochemical properties of the material use pattern of the material and characteristics of the environment where the material is handled source of exposure, normal and accidental control measures used to regulate exposure the duration, magnitude, and frequency of exposure route of exposure and physical nature of exposure conditions, eg, gas, aerosol, or Hquid population exposed and variabiUty in exposure conditions and experience with exposed human populations. 

Hazards that could lead to injury of company personnel. Partial redundancy is often required (For example, redundant measurements but not redundant logic). 

There are differences in terminology on the meaning of risk in the pubhshed literature that can lead to confusion. Risk has been defined in various ways (CPQRA, 1989, pp. 3, 4). In this edition of the handbook, risk is defined as A measure of economic loss or injuiy in terms of both the incident likehhood and magnitude of loss or injury. Risk imphes a probability of something occurring. 

A measure of human injury, environmental damage, or economic loss in terms of both the incident likelihood and the magnitude of the loss or injury... 

Ways of combining information on likelihood with the magnitude of loss or injury (e.g., risk indices, individual risk measures, and societal risk measures)... 

This step takes the information from Steps 6 and 8. The frequency of an accident multiplied by the consequences is the risk. The consequences need to be in common units to get a measure of the risk. Of course, multiple consequence measures may be used and give multiple risk measures frequency of fatalities, frequency of injuries, frequency of fishkill, frequency of monetary loss. Judgment must be used to rank there relative significance. 

To develop a safe design, it is necessary to first design and specify all equipment and systems in accordance with applicable codes and standards. Once the system is designed, a process safety shutdown system is specified to assure that potential hazards that can be detected by measuring process upsets are detected, and that appropriate safety actions (normally an automatic shutdown) are initiated. A hazards analysis is then normally undertaken to identify and mitigate potential hazards that could lead to fire, explosion, pollution, or injury to personnel and that cannot be detected as process upsets. Finally, a system of safety management is implemented to assure the system is operated and maintained in a safe manner by personnel who have received adequate training. 

Measurement must address end-of-pipe performance (through measures such as injury rates and gallons spilled), process efficiency and indicators of performance (through measures such as in service failure of equipment). Using indicators should make it possible to identify problems before they result in poor performance. Process efficiency measurement helps track implementation of the project and continuous improvement in the use of resources. 

The assessment should also seek out systems for measuring performance. Remember that there is a need to measure both PSM and ESH performance, as well as the effectiveness of the processes in place. It is likely that at least some PSM and ESH performance measures will be in place, such as injury rates, number of incident investigations, regulatory infractions and insurance premiums. Your questions should probe for issues that managers track, but perhaps only informally, that could provide new measures of performance. 

Measurement of performance. Quality Management requires that measures of performance be established for every activity. These measures include end-of-pipe measurement, such as amounts of material released into the environment or injury rates, and in-process measures of how efficiently you are managing, such as time to review safety improvement proposals or total resources expended on PSM. Each team should be required to identify potential performance measures for the processes they are developing and the activities these processes manage. Many of the end-of-pipe measures will already exist these should be critically examined to ensure that they truly measure performance and are not unduly influenced by other factors. For example, the number of accidents in a fleet of road vehicles is almost directly dependent on the number of miles driven with no improvement in performance, a reduction in miles driven would reduce the number of accidents. 

Incentive measures are generally used to draw attention to PSM and ESH performance issues that are, to some extent, controlled by worker behavior or management attention. These measures are frequently used for distributing incentive awards or at-risk pay when particular targets are met, for example 1 million hours without an injury or a target number of changes processed correctly. Whether your company uses incentive measures and awards is a matter of corporate practice. 

Improving performance is the objective of measurement. Thus measures should be capable of analysis to help identify where there may be weaknesses that can be corrected. For example, injury data may be published division by division. If one division has deteriorating performance, it will be important to find out whether the deterioration is common across the whole division or specific to one location. 

There are many definitions of the word risk. It is a combination of uncertainty and damage a ratio of Itazards to safeguards a triplet combination of event, probability, and consequences or even a measure of economic loss or human injury in terms of both the incident likelihood and tlie magnitude of the loss or injuiy (AICliE, 1989). People face all kinds of risks eveiyday, some voluntarily and otliers involuntarily. Tlierefore, risk plays a very important role in today s world. Studies on cancer caused a turning point in tlie world of risk because it opened tlie eyes of risk scientists and healtli professionals to tlie world of risk assessments. 

Individual Risk - This provides a measure of tlie risk to a person in tlie vicinity of a liazard/accideiit, including tlie nature of the injury or otlier undesired outcomes, and tlie likelihood of occurrence. Individual risk is generally expressed in terms of a likelihood or probability of a specified undesired outcome per unit of time. For example (as indicated above), tlie... 

Risk is defined as tlie product of two factors (1) tlie probability of an undesirable event and (2) tlie measured consequences of the undesirable event. Measured consequences may be stated in terms of financial loss, injuries, deatlis, or Ollier variables. Failure represents an inability to perform some required function. Reliability is the probability that a system or one of its components will perform its intended function mider certain conditions for a specified period. Tlie reliability of a system and its probability of failure are complementary in tlie sense tliat the sum of these two probabilities is unity. This cluipler considers basic concepts and llieorenis of probability tliat find application in tlie estimation of risk and reliability. 

---