Workplace environment safety practices

In the area of workplace harassment or the prevention of a hostile work environment, safety professionals should be aware that what may be considered to be horseplay by some may be considered workplace harassment to others. The harassment is viewed through the eyes of the employee being harassed. Although most safety professionals do not permit any type of horseplay in their operations, it is important for safety professionals to be aware of other activities, such as name calling, practical jokes, and other similar activities that may also create a hostile work environment for an individual employee who is protected under the ADEA as well as other federal antidiscrimination laws. 

The need for off-gas treatment of Group I GMO fermentations is a debatable point. From the health and safety viewpoint, exhaust gas could be vented away from the workplace environment. If this were planned, then an environmental risk assessment would need to demonstrate the practice to be acceptable. Winkler and Parke " discuss some of the factors concerned with environmental risk assessment for GMO aerosols. 

In theory, the IH is responsible for chemical, biological,physical, and radioactive health hazards within the work environment. In practice, no one individual can be an expert in all of these areas. Control of workplace health hazards has become so complex that in workplaces where most or all of these hazards are present, the management of these hazards is assigned to a team of occupational health professionals. Such a team might include an occupational physician, occupational nurse, safety professional, health physicist (radiation protection), and others. Workplaces with high-risk microbiological exposures may also employ biological safety professionals. 

Work environment issues are covered by the Workplace (Health, Safety and Welfare) Regulations together with an Approved Code of Practice and additional guidance. 

Government regulation will continue to be a significant part of the practice of chemical process safety. Since the OSHAct was signed into law, substantial new legislation controlling the workplace and community environment has been enacted. Table 3-3 provides a summary of... 

In the case of an important industrial chemical such as acrylonitrile, that can be used in quantities of the order of 1000s of tonnes, measures to reduce risk will include deflning an acceptable exposure level at the workplace and monitoring the environment to ensue compliance. Ideally, the workers themselves should be monitored to determine the quantities absorbed during exposure, but this is rarely practical. An important parallel contribution to the overall safety assessment of acrylonitrile is an epidemiological study of the mortality figures for the exposed workforce. 

Based on risk assessments, a manager lists and schedules the work needed to be done to create a safe and healthy work environment and to eliminate high-risk acts of people. If the need is to change the safety culture at the workplace, this would mean the inti oduction of a suitable structured SMS based on world s best practice. All SMS should be based on the nature of the business and be risk based, management led, and audit driven. 

There was no explicit assessment of safety culture, in combination with a quantitative evaluation of the HSE environment in the accident reports. Such an assessment could be used to get a collective measure or temperarnre of the priority of safety in the organization, related to best practice . In Itho (2004) there is shown a correlation between the level of safety culture and quantitative incidents/acddents thus safety culture could be used as an indicator of the holes in harriers or the level of erosion of barriers, in combination with quantitative HSE data. A more specific measure tan culture is described by Rundmo (1997) i.e. when an employee in the Norwegian oil and gas industry feels at risk he/she is at risk. A proactive indicator could thus be a workplace survey, measuring risk perceptions or performing a more broadly based assessment of safety culture in combination with other local quantitative indicators such as gas emissions, injuries compared with best practice in the industry. 

Prudent Practices 1981 and Prudent Practices 1983 were conceived during the late 1970s in recognition of growing public expectations for health and safety in the workplace, protection of the environment, and the responsible use of hazardous chemicals. Since their original puhhcation in the early 1980s, these reports have been distributed widely both nationally and internationally. In 1992, the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry and the World Health Organization published Chemical Safety Matters, a document based on Prudent Practices 1981 and Prudent Practices 1983, for wide international use. 

The prevention of personnel and environmental incidents in work-related environments or situations. Effective occupational safety efforts involve the control and elimination of recognized workplace hazards to attain an acceptable level of risk and promote the wellness of workers. Optimal occupational safety results from a continuous proactive process of anticipating, identifying, designing, implementing, and evaluating risk-reduction practices. 

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