Management elements assessment

JECFA is a scientific advisory body established in tire 1950s, prior to the establishment of the CAC. Over the past 40 years, it has provided independent scientific advice to all FAO and WHO member countries. The traditional and current activities of JECFA are mainly in the area of risk assessment, not risk management. To some extent, however, JECFA activities also touch on risk management. Risk assessment, risk management, and risk communication constitute the three basic elements of risk analysis that are taken into account in the Codex procedure for setting MRLs of veterinary drug residues in foods (Table 11.1). 

Lagging and leading indicators provide little guidance to do with some of the more abstract management elements such as process safety culture and management review. This difficulty is entirely overcome when a management assessment approach is used. 

From a business perspective, application of risk concepts involve two main elements. One is risk assessment. The other is risk management. Risk assessment involves methods that identify business risks. Among the business risks are safety and health risks for employees, customers, and the public. There are also risks to the equipment, property, and financial condition of a business. Risk management involves evaluating identified risks and making decisions about how to handle them from a business perspective. 

Project Risk Register (PRR) is used for proper assessment of risk scenario and their management with a special emphasis on its cost consequences. For speedy dispute resolution, PRR is used worldwide. The major elements assessed in a PRR are as follows ... 

Transition application management process. This document describes the applications management element of the transition process. The change made to this document was to highlight that it is necessary to identify any safety-related applications within those that are to be supported, and to assess their criticality so that they can be handled appropriately. 

Discuss the elements of a safety management system assessment. 

A safety management system assessment goes beyond just audits of safety program elements where the intent is to find only errors or problems and ignore what is being done correctly. 

The formal SHE management element is rooted in the scientific management school as well (Heinrich, 1959). It represents a necessary complement to ensure that the SHE aspects are given adequate attention by management. It involves the use of SHE information systems and different specialised tools for risk identification and assessment. 

FIGURE 5.32 Elements of risk assessment and risk management. (used with permission.)... 

The basis for your program plan should be your team s assessment of the current PSM status (Figure 4-11), which will have yielded a list of deficiencies compared with the required PSM elements. These gaps must now be translated into statements of required tasks, which in turn suggest work products for inclusion in your implementation plan. For example, your assessment shows that the process knowledge and documentation management system needs improvement. To address this gap you need to plan a series of tasks. 

As part of developing the PSM implementation plan (Chapter 5), you and the team identified benefits unique to the approach you selected, using them to help win management s approval. For example, your plan may focus on priority elements because the assessment you conducted suggests that this method will yield the greatest overall improvement in safety performance. And, as part of the pilot test described in this chapter, you focused on facility-specific benefits to enlist the support of local management and staff. 

Inventory and Assess All PSM, ESH, and Quality Management Programs and Elements... 

The level of effort estimates given in Exhibit 4-1 are for time used by the project team. Design time is an estimate of the number of person days that will be needed to develop a fully defined system program/element or management process starting with the data collected during the assessment phase. 

In essence, the earlier components of this overall assessment process are mainly deterministic in character (albeit with some probabilistic elements), whereas the later stages are mainly probabilistic. Not all elements of the process are quantifiable (with any degree of confidence), however and the socicii-political-cultural context of any downstream decision-making process may be intensely uncertain. Such uncertainties make the process of risk communication and debate a complex and sometimes unpredictable undertaking. It is essential therefore that those elements of the risk management process that cein be objectively einalysed and evaluated (either qualitatively or quantitatively, as appropriate) are so assessed. 

Exposure assessments have become an essential element of contemporary risk assessment (NAS/NRC, 1983). The primary purpose of exposure assessment is to qualitatively and/or quantitatively determine exposure and absorbed dose associated with a particular use practice or human activity. Contemporary exposure assessors and risk managers place a high premium on accurate data obtained by monitoring chemical exposure scenarios and critical human activities or work tasks. 

Table 3 describes the main parts of an environmental risk assessment (ERA) that are based on the two major elements characterisation of exposure and characterisation of effects [27, 51]. ERA uses a combination of exposure and effects data as a basis for assessing the likelihood and severity of adverse effects (risks) and feeds this into the decision-making process for managing risks. The process of assessing risk ranges from the simple calculation of hazard ratios to complex utilisation of probabilistic methods based on models and/or measured data sets. Setting of thresholds such as EQS and quality norms (QN) [27] relies primarily on... 

The link between the ecological/ecotoxicological risk assessment and the risk management frameworks is demonstrated. The ecological risk assessment consists of seven interactive elements (Fig. 17). The quantitative and descriptive science used to conduct ERA (Table 5) does not answer, in a direct way, the question of what should be done to manage the risk. Science determines adversity, but the public determines acceptability (Fig. 18). But acceptable risk is a highly subjective and relative term. It is time and space-specific and depends upon definitions of quality of life and robustness of the environment. 

A comprehensive approach to a states response to a chemical terrorism includes having a plan not only for the crisis and consequence management phases of the incident, but also for all elements required for complete resolution of the event. This may include the necessity to definitively establish whether chemical agents were used, to provide supporting evidence to confirm other analyses, or to provide the forensic proof required to support a criminal prosecution. The collection and analysis of biomedical samples - blood, urine or other tissue from affected humans or animals - is one of the means for providing such information. Although current capabilities such as urinary thiodyglycol excretion or plasma cholinesterase activity can be performed, there is scope for far more sensitive and specific assessments that overcome the limitations of these approaches. 

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