Safety professionals task analysis

Development and Validation of Career Development Guidelines by Task/Activity Analysis of Occupational Safety and Health Professions Industrial Hygiene and Safety Professional. National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, Contract CDC-99-74-94, 1977. 

What is needed is an integrated ergonomics task analysis system that addresses productivity, cost efficiency, safety, and sometimes quality — all in one study. That would be unique. In support of that idea, consider these excerpts from the web page for ergo web, taken from a January 2001 entry quoting Dr. Peter Budnick, a professional ergonomist and CEO of ErgoWeb ... 

I suggest that safety professionals give task analysis a greater emphasis as a qualitative predictor of the probability of hazards-related incidents occurring. Task analyses are to define hazardous or inefficient work procedures. 

If a safety professional really wants to know what hazards may create problems tomorrow, task analysis is a highly effective way to identify them. Of course, the process would culminate in proposals for the appropriate preventive actions. The ancillary benefits are considerable, since many people can be trained through the task analysis process to identify hazards and how to seek their elimination or control. 

Industrial or occupational safety and health professionals have been involved for some time now in the analysis of tasks that must be performed in the workplace and the human interface that must occur in order to accomplish a given task. In actuality, the modern methods of task analysis and job analysis were initially developed as a result of the somewhat historic time and motion studies conducted in the early twentieth cenmry. These techniques were later enhanced further during the U.S. Department of Labor s efforts in occupational analysis conducted in 1930. These... 

The JSA and the analysis of job or task risk is (or should be) a critical element in the assurance of worker safety and health. However, its potential for success can be severely hindered when the JSA is not utilized or performed properly. As stated earlier in this chapter, it is usually the task supervisor and the work team that will complete the JSA. At the very least, this means that consistency in JSA approach and completion can be as varied as the tasks being analyzed. Ideally, the safety professional should also participate in JSA development to facilitate the process and ensure the proper and complete analysis of the given task. However, in reality, most industrial safety and health practitioners may not always be involved or even present when a JSA exercise takes place. 

The key to an effective ergonomics program is to identify problems before they begin. Safety professionals should look for potential CTD problems during task analysis activities by using physiological motion categories that focus attention on awkward (unnatural) postures and frequent repetitions of motions. 

Once the task analysis has been performed and ergonomic problems have been observed, a determination is made as to how to eliminate the hazards. One method to achieve this goal is by examining how the work area is laid out and redesigning the workplace to eliminate the problems. Knowledge of workstations will help the safety professional in this process. 

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 ... 

Industrial or occupational safety and health professionals have been involved for some time now in the analysis of tasks which must be performed in the workplace... 

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