Documents model 83 results

"Work disability prevention interventions are complex innovations competing against usual care, workplace habits, and social insurance systems' complexity. The trial effectiveness of these interventions does not guarantee their implementation and sustainability. Multilevel barriers in the healthcare, workplace and insurance systems must be identified and tackled, and implementation strategies must be evaluated to monitor the implementation process and fidelity."

"Informal employment represents more than half of nonagricultural employment in most developing regions, contributes to the overall economy, and provides pathways to reduction of poverty and inequality. Support to the informal economy should include the expansion of occupational health and safety to include informal workers, based on an analysis of their work places and work risks. The paper presents main schools of thought and argues for a holistic understanding of the different segments of the informal work force and for policies and interventions tailored to the needs and constraints of these different segments. The paper recommends a policy approach which seeks to extend social protection, including occupational health and safety services, to informal workers, and to increase the productivity of informal enterprises and informal workers through an enabling environment and support services. The paper calls for a new paradigm of a hybrid economy which would value and integrate the informal economy alongside the formal economies."

"Occupational exposure limits (OELs) are a critical component of the risk assessment and risk management process and their use remains a staple of occupational hygiene practice. There are dozens of organizations and agencies that derive OELs worldwide. Yet, while most of these groups describe their administrative procedures as well as the rationale for the derivation of OELs for individual substances, few provide equally complete documentation of the underlying scientific methodology for conducting the quantitative risk assessment employed in OEL development. The paucity of written descriptions of OEL development methodology has resulted in a lack of transparency related to implementation of important scientific principles for OEL development and inconsistent practices for OEL development within and among organizations. The absence of such transparency limits the opportunities for international harmonization of existing values and OEL setting practices among organizations."

"Virtually no occupational exposure standards specify the level of risk for the prescribed exposure, and most occupational exposure limits are not based on quantitative risk assessment (QRA) at all. Wider use of QRA could improve understanding of occupational risks while increasing focus on identifying exposure concentrations conferring acceptably low levels of risk to workers. Exposure-response modeling between a defined hazard and the biological response of interest is necessary to provide a quantitative foundation for risk-based occupational exposure limits; and there has been considerable work devoted to establishing reliable methods quantifying the exposure-response relationship including methods of extrapolation below the observed responses. We review several exposure-response modeling methods available for QRA, and demonstrate their utility with simulated data sets."

"Jens Rasmussen has been a very influential thinker for the last quarter of the 20th century in the safety science field and especially in major hazard prevention. He shaped many of the basic assumptions regarding safety and accidents which are still held today. One can see that many of his ideas underlie more recent advances in this field. Indeed, in the first decade of the 21st century, many have been inspired by his propositions and have pursued their own research agendas by using, extending or criticising his ideas. The author of numerous articles, chapters of books and books, Rasmussen had an inspiring scientific research record spreading over 30 years, expanding across the boundaries of many scientific disciplines. This article introduces selected elements of Rasmussen's legacy, including the SRK model, his theoretical approach of errors, the issue of investigating accidents, his model of migration and the sociotechnical view. It will be demonstrated that Jens Rasmussen provided key concepts for understanding safety and accidents, many of which are still relevant today. In particular, this article introduces how some principles such as degree of freedom, self organisation and adaptation, defence in depth fallacy but also the notion of error as ‘unsuccessful experiment with unacceptable consequences' still offer powerful insights into the challenge of predicting and preventing major accidents. It is also argued that they combine into a specific interpretation of the ‘normal accident' debate, anticipating current trends based on complexity lenses. Overall, Jens Rasmussen defines the contours of what is called ‘a strong program for a hard problem'."

"Este ensaio aborda as contribuições de Ivar Oddone e do Modelo Operário Italiano (MOI) de luta pela saúde para o desenvolvimento do campo da Saúde do Trabalhador, particularmente no Brasil. Primeiramente, faz-se um balanço das formas de incorporação do legado do MOI nos estudos e nas práticas de Saúde do Trabalhador. A seguir, apresenta-se a experiência de construção de cartografias de riscos industriais desenvolvida em região do sudeste da França. A terceira parte trata da concepção de "comunidade científica ampliada" e suas derivações. Ao final, discute-se a técnica de "instrução ao sósia" como um instrumento eficaz para a reapropriação, pelos trabalhadores, de suas estratégias de ação no trabalho, assim como para desenvolvê-las. Destaca-se que não se trata de incorporar esse patrimônio tal e qual foi utilizado na Itália, mas de explorar seus princípios e experimentações, considerando seu potencial de produção de ações coletivas e de fortalecimento de mobilizações já existentes. Sinaliza-se a atualidade do MOI, pois, apesar das tradicionais formas de luta dos trabalhadores estarem menos visíveis, a capacidade de recriação dos trabalhadores é um potencial em que se deve apostar."

"Quatre ans après la publication de la note ayant pour titre « Écotoxicologie des nanoparticules : avancées méthodologiques dans l'évaluation des risques» , cette note a pour objectif de refaire le bilan sur les progrès réalisés dans le domaine. En effet, la période de veille écoulée a été marquée par la publication de nombreuses revues de la littérature contenant notamment le mot?clef « analytical » : concept analytique, approche analytique, technique analytique, méthode analytique. Ainsi, après une dizaine d'années d'investigations en écotoxicologie des nanomatériaux, les chercheurs font un point en termes de techniques utilisées pour la caractérisation, la détection et la détermination des effets des nanoparticules (NPs). Lorsque les premières études ont débuté, les outils et approches classiques d'écotoxicologie ont été appliqués à ce contaminant émergent qu'étaient les NPs. L'expérience a permis de démontrer que certaines méthodes pouvaient être appliquées telles quelles, que d'autres étaient biaisées par la nature des NPs et donc non utilisables ou encore que certaines autres devaient être adaptées. Malgré ces progrès, la constatation reste la même : le manque d'outils performants limite toujours la prédiction et la gestion des risques, notamment dans le cas de problématiques environnementales (échantillons complexes, dilués,…). Cette note s'intéresse donc au développement de nouvelles techniques (marquage isotope stable, KED ICP?MS1) ainsi qu'à l'émergence de la modélisation des risques à partir de modèles pré? existants originaux ou adaptés."

"In many safety–critical systems, it is necessary to maintain operators' situation awareness at a high level to ensure the safety of operations. Today, in many such systems, operators have to rely on the principles and design of human-system interfaces (HSIs) to observe and comprehend the overwhelming amount of process data. Thus, poor HSIs may cause serious consequences, such as occupational accidents and diseases including stress, and they have therefore been considered an emerging risk. Despite the importance of this, very few methods have as yet been developed to assess the risk of HSIs. This paper presents a new risk assessment method that relies upon operators' mental models, human reliability analysis (HRA) event tree, and the situation awareness global assessment technique (SAGAT) to produce a risk profile for the intended HSI. In the proposed method, the operator's understanding (i.e. mental models) about possible abnormal situations in the intended plant is modeled on the basis of the capabilities of Bayesian networks. The situation models are combined with the HRA event tree, which paves the way for the incorporation of operator responses in the assessment method. Probe questions in line with the SAGAT through simulated scenarios in a virtual environment are then administrated to gather operator responses. Finally, the proposed method determines a risk level for the HSI by assigning the operator responses to the developed situational networks. The performance of the proposed method is investigated through a case study at a chemical plant."