Purpose of OSHA

To ensure, as much as possible, a healthy and safe workplace and conditions for workers in the United States, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration was created by the OSHAct to 

Encourage employers and employees to reduce workplace hazards by implementing new and improving existing safety and health programs. 

Provide for research in occupational safety and health to develop innovative ways of dealing with occupational safety and health problems. 

Establish separate but dependent responsibilities and rights for employers and employees for the achievement of better safety and health conditions. 

Maintain a reporting and recordkeeping system to monitor job-related injuries and illnesses. 

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Workplace regulations (see Table 14.10.1) are promulgated and enforeed in the U.S. by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), whieh is in the Department of Labor. The purpose of OSHA is to ensure that the employers maintain a safe and healthful workplace. Several workplaee standards that affect extraction solvents are discussed. 

It cannot be overemphasized that the principal elements of a sound industrial safety program, with its primary purpose of OSHA compliance, work hazard reduction, assurance of employee/job safety and health, and the evaluation of jobs or tasks (through the ISA or another comparable method), can, in most cases, be achieved through application of the system safety process. The connection between the two programs, while not entirely obvious, is quite understandable, as described above. Perhaps the most important thing to remember here is that the industrial or occupational safety and health professional can utilize the time-proven techniques of hazard reduction and system safety analysis to accomplish the desired goal of both programs ... 

How do I know if an event or exposure in the work environment significantly aggravated" a preexisting injury or illness A preexisting injury or illness has been significantly aggravated, for purposes of OSHA injury and... 

What is the purpose of OSHA s hazard communication standard ... 

As these paragraphs make clear, OSHA requires employers to follow the physician s or HCP s recommendation when recording a case. For purposes of OSHA recordkeeping, the case met the criteria in 1904.7 at the time of recording because the employee had sustained a work-related injuiy — a bruised knee — involving one or more days away from work. The subsequent MRI results do not change these facts. Accordingly, the MRI results are not a basis to hne out the entry. 

A. OSHA explains that in order to correctly apply the work-related exception 1904. 5(b)(2)(v), the case must meet both of the following conditions. The case must involve first, personal tasks at the establishment and second, must have occurred outside of the employee s assigned working hours. The nature of the activity in which the employee is engaged in at the time of the event or exposure, the degree of employer control over the employee s activity, the preventability of the incident, or the concept of fault do not affect the determination of work-relationship. For purposes of OSHA recordkeeping, the case did not meet the entire criteria under 1904.5(b)(2)(v). 

The NIOSH IDLH is defined by the NIOSH-OSHA Standard Completions Program only for the purpose of respirator selection and represents a maximum concentration from which, in the event of respiratory failure, one could escape within 30 min without experiencing any escape-impairing or irreversible health. 

For the purpose of the OSHA PSM Standard, NFPA instability ratings have the following limitations with respect to identifying reactive hazards ... 

The CSB incident data were analyzed to determine whether the chemicals involved were considered highly hazardous under the OSHA PSM Standard. For the purposes of analyzing the data, CSB determined if a chemical was covered by OSHA PSM by identifying whether it was listed in PSM or was covered as a flammable chemical by OSHA definition.38... 

Again, it is also important to remember that chemical emergency situations can easily reach beyond the boundaries of any industrial plant. This is to be expected, especially in this age of population explosion with its characteristic urban sprawl. It is not unusual to find, for example, a chemical industrial plant site or other industrial plant that originally was isolated from city dwellers but later became surrounded on all sides by neighbors. The point is that when a chemical spill or chemical disaster occurs in an isolated area there may be no cause for general alarm however, when such a deliberate disaster occurs in the plant site as described in the sugar plant incident, it should be clear that the purpose of PSM, RMP, the Patriot Act, Homeland Security directives, OSHA s Combustible Dust NEP, and other safety/security factors is far-reaching—and absolutely critical to the survival of a free society. 

Even though no single OSHA standard is dedicated specifically to the issue of planning for chemical emergencies, all OSHA standards are written for the purpose of promoting a safe, healthy, accident-free, and hence emergency-free workplace. Therefore, OSHA standards do play a role in emergency prevention. 

In two of the three plant examples, LVE s were run simultaneously with CAM or PCAM equipment for purposes of establishing equivalency according to the OSHA criterion and according to more detailed procedures given in the "Protocol Paper" C2.). CAM/LVE equivalency was demonstrated in both these cases. It was not possible to use LVE s in the third test. 

The purpose of the validation program was to assure that accurate personal sampling and analytical methods would be available for use by OSHA in monitoring for non-compliance to the OSHA permissible exposure limits (PEL s). The methods are available to others who may want to use them to determine worker exposure to the substances in the OSHA regulations. 

Since the advent of OSHA (Occupational Safety and Health Administration), tremendous advances have been made in the degree of sophistication and data gathering ability of toxic substance monitoring instrumentation. Traditionally, exposure standards are often limited by the measurement techniques used to determine exposure. The introduction of new, small computers on a chip, particularly those that have an extensive memory and can be programmed, represents a technology that revolutionizes the measurement of occupational exposures, providing more complete and accurate data. A microprocessor-based dosimeter has been developed with this purpose in mind. 

The purpose of this chapter is to raise awareness. Details to consider for a Management of Change Program suitable to satisfy OSHA s Process Safety Management regulation will follow in Chapter 11. 

In order to adequately develop a medical surveillance plan, one must perform a thorough assessment of the physical, biologic, and/or chemical hazards to which personnel may be exposed and which have the potential to cause adverse health effects. For certain chemical substances, medical surveillance is prescribed by law. The standards are set by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). Attention to sensitivity, specificity, and predictive value is particularly important in occupational screening programs. The primary purpose of medical surveillance is the elimination of exposures that cause disease. Medical surveillance s ultimate goal is prevention. 

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