Needs assessment accidents

Safety professionals should consider making a needs assessment, from the top down, to determine how much creative destruction and reconstruction through re-education are needed to achieve a mind-set that gives a proper place to reducing the potential for serious injury. Safety management systems that concentrate largely on the personal aspects of safety do not include activities to anticipate and identity the causal factors for low-probability/severe-consequence accidents. Nor do they include specially crafted efforts for their prevention. 

Conduct a risk assessment to any employee and other persons to identify measures needed to restrict exposure to ionizing radiation and to assess magnitude of risk including identifiable accidents. 

A 100 Degree Rule was often used in the past throughout the chemical industry to assess whether an accident would occur. According to this rule, if the operating temperature of a process is 100 "C away from the nearest detectable exotherm observed in DSC (Differential Scanning Calorimetry) experiment the operation will not experience this thermal event. In such a case no more detailed information on hazards need be searched for. The 100°C degree rule is, however, often far from the safety margin The use of this rule was the reason of many accidents. 

Using the techniques referenced in Section 5.2, a detailed list of potential accident scenarios can be prepared. This list can then be refined to give the minimum number of scenarios that need to be assessed to adequately reflect the spectrum of possible incidents and to satisfy the requirements of the study. The steps involved may include ... 

Commercial and public transportation heavily relies on human operators. There is growing evidence that sleep loss may play a large role in transportation accidents. A committee formed at the 1986 meeting of the Association of Professional Sleep Societies found that numerous performance failures leading to catastrophic events occur most often at times of day coincident with the temporal patterns of brain processes associated with sleep (3). In addition, an investigation in the Netherlands showed that the highest accident rate in public transit accidents occurred in bus drivers who began an early work shift (4). An assessment of the impact of sleep loss in commercial and public transportation is therefore needed. 

Six Steps to a New Source of Critical Data. When implementing the TCA methodology, a company needs to first assemble a team that has the ability to assess the types of costs shown in Table 6.8. This might include a health and safety professional to help with the cost of a potential accident, a brand marketing specialist... 

Under raw material consumption, the mass of raw materials needed by the corresponding process is determined first. The individual materials are weighted according to their reserves. The toxicity potential is calculated using the classifications for hazardous materials under EU law. The abuse and risk potential refiects the dangers of accidents in the manufacture, use and recycling of the product. The approach adopted is similar to a risk assessment in the case of plant safety in which the probability of occurrence and the level of damage are estimated. Values used for the individual products are only comparative and not absolute. 

C. Alcohol tests. These arc sometimes u.sed to assess fitness to drive. In clinical practice alcohol measurements need to be carefully interpreted. In the Accident and Emergency setting, extreme caution must be taken before one can fully ascribe eonfusitm in a patient with head injury to the effects of alcohol. a common complical ing feature in such patients. 

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