• Safety and Health at Work
• /
• v.15 no.2
• /
• pp.139-146
• /
• 2024

Background: This research suggested a method for evaluating health and safety performance as a combination of reactive and active monitoring. Methods: A number of Freedom of Information requests (FoI) were sent to the Health and safety Executive (HSE) and 100 UK universities. Data on the number of reportable incidents, diseases and dangerous occurrences were compiled for UK universities and combined with the Impact Ranking for good health and well-being. A semi-structured survey was used to identify best H&S practices. Subsequently, the effect of workers' involvement in H&S management on RIDDOR and near-miss reports, was investigated using statistical analysis. Results: A ranking of UK universities that perform highly in Health and Safety (H&S) was assembled and selected universities were contacted to identify best practices. Best practices were divided into three categories: team management, roles and responsibilities, and H&S performance monitoring. One of the findings demonstrated a reverse dependence between provision of a refresher training in risk assessments and a number of reported RIDDOR incidents. Conclusion: Health and Safety professionals in the universities may find it useful to reflect on these findings and the identified best practices in order to improve the H&S performance in their own organisations.

• Journal of Korean Society of Occupational and Environmental Hygiene
• /
• v.28 no.1
• /
• pp.18-34
• /
• 2018

Objectives: This study aims to identify and solve problems in the consistency, procedural justification, effectiveness, and other matters concerning approaches to occupational safety and health legislation, administrative rules, and administrative guidelines. Methods: In this study of policy on the industrial safety and health law of Korea, problems were raised based on important information on the approach to occupational safety and health legislation and administrative guidelines such as notices, ordinances, and instructions, as well as on their interpretation and operation standards. Secondly, based on the identified problems in the occupational safety and health law policy, core practical methods to present improvement directions for occupational safety health policy in Korea were sought. Results: It is absolutely necessary to actively promote the infrastructure for occupational safety and health by developing and disseminating notices, guidelines, and manuals that act as contact points between laws and the field in various ways at the administrative institution level. In addition to sanctions, efforts to systematically guide and promote complex professional matters must be supported. Efforts should be made to strengthen administrative expertise so that administrative authorities can secure professional authority and fully enforce legal policies according to the purpose of legislation. In order to ensure the effectiveness of occupational safety and health law policies, it is necessary to shift the focus of the legal policy toward confirming and guiding substantial compliance with legal standards. Conclusions: As a result of the above efforts, when reliable occupational safety and health law policy is implemented, the understanding and acceptance of the legal policy for the administrative object will be increased, and the safety and health management of the enterprise will be maximized to its full extent.

• Safety and Health at Work
• /
• v.2 no.2
• /
• pp.105-121
• /
• 2011

Objectives: This paper presents the framework and protocol design for a construction industry risk management toolbox. The construction industry needs a comprehensive, systematic approach to assess and control occupational risks. These risks span several professional health and safety disciplines, emphasized by multiple international occupational research agenda projects including: falls, electrocution, noise, silica, welding fumes, and musculoskeletal disorders. Yet, the International Social Security Association says, "whereas progress has been made in safety and health, the construction industry is still a high risk sector." Methods: Small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) employ about 80% of the world's construction workers. In recent years a strategy for qualitative occupational risk management, known as Control Banding (CB) has gained international attention as a simplified approach for reducing work-related risks. CB groups hazards into stratified risk 'bands', identifying commensurate controls to reduce the level of risk and promote worker health and safety. We review these qualitative solutions-based approaches and identify strengths and weaknesses toward designing a simplified CB 'toolbox' approach for use by SMEs in construction trades. Results: This toolbox design proposal includes international input on multidisciplinary approaches for performing a qualitative risk assessment determining a risk 'band' for a given project. Risk bands are used to identify the appropriate level of training to oversee construction work, leading to commensurate and appropriate control methods to perform the work safely. Conclusion: The Construction Toolbox presents a review-generated format to harness multiple solutions-based national programs and publications for controlling construction-related risks with simplified approaches across the occupational safety, health and hygiene professions.

• Journal of Korean Society of Occupational and Environmental Hygiene
• /
• v.17 no.4
• /
• pp.322-334
• /
• 2007

This study covers the investigation of the actual condition in the workplace to produce plastics products using synthetic resins and the investigation on the trends amount of the domestic production of thermoplastic resins. To analyze the monomers included in thermoplastic resins frequently used in the workplace, we analyzed thermal characteristics for test compounds using thermogravimetric analysis and did the qualitative analysis using Pyrolyzer GC-MSD & TDS GC-MSD. And then we classified the health hazard of monomers based on GHS classification criteria using information toxicity & carcinogenicity. The number of the workplace to produce plastics products among all domestic manufacturers of 73,884 was 4,391 (5.94%). The number of workers to produce plastics products among all workers of 2,522,750 in all domestic manufacturers was 104,971 (4.16%). The amount of production per year for thermoplastic resins is in the order of PP, HDPE, LDPE, PVC, ABS, PS and such compounds was producing over 1 Million ton per year each. The classification result based on GHS classification criteria for 22 main compounds included thermoplastic resins says 2 compounds of acrylonitrile, naphthalene are in Acute oral category 3 and benzene is in Acute dermal category 1. The classification results of health hazard of carcinogenicity based on IARC & ACGIH carcinogen classification says 2 compounds of benzene, vinyl chloride are in category 1A (known to be human carcinogens).

• Korean Journal of Health Education and Promotion
• /
• v.24 no.4
• /
• pp.41-64
• /
• 2007

Objectives: The purpose of this study was to verify the validity of the evaluation indicators on safety and health education programs provided to Korean industrial workers, by developing further. Methods: To develop the early evaluation indicator, the secondary analysis was made on 'Survey on Industrial safety & health trends', the national wide survey data product by Korea Occupational Safety & Health Agency, as well as the various examinations on literatures. To validate such developed evaluation indicator, 13 safety and health managers in Focus Group discussion to prove the reliability of the contents were composed. To confirm the face validity, the interview with 6 industrial safety and health education experts was held to study the appropriateness of the content. With the cooperation from Korea Occupational Safety & Health Agency, the structured survey was performed with the safety and health managers from 588 businesses who participated in the education program for the later half of 2006. In this study, the number of responses was randomly divided into 1:1 two groups, in which one group was for the Exploratory Factor Analysis and the other group was for the Confirmatory Factor Analysis. Results: The results were as follows. First, for the Structure category, 18 evaluation indicators were developed into 4 evaluation categories such as a preliminary examination, education staff and organization, education environment and rules/ regulation. Secondly, the Activity category was comprised of 10 evaluation indicators with respect to 2 areas of curriculum satisfaction and program evaluation. Finally, for the Output category, 9 evaluation indicators were developed into 2 evaluation areas such as documentation and information share and education effects. Conclusions: The evaluation indicators developed through this study will possibly develop and be applied to evaluation tools on safety and health education program, which may further become the standardized indicators to better operate the industrial safety and health education programs.

• Journal of the Korea Safety Management & Science
• /
• v.12 no.3
• /
• pp.53-60
• /
• 2010

Texts and icons are used to deliver the safety and health information on pesticide labels. This study surveyed the standards or guidelines regarding the presentation formats of texts and icons used in pesticides. Also, the text and icon formats being used in the 50 pesticide products in Korea were investigated in the aspects of size, font (texts only), color. From the guideline survey, it was found that while the guidelines for the text fonts and colors in pesticides were suggested, there was no detailed guidelines about the text size. For the icon presentation, it was regulated that the icon size for the pesticides should be larger than $7mm{\times}7mm$, and this size was equivalent to the size when the reading distance of 28 ㎝ was applied to other two guidelines. From the sample survey of the 50 pesticides, it was found that the small text size being used in the 50 pesticides was 1mm (3pt), and this size was considered to be very difficult to be read, particularly by old people. The minimum size of the texts for the toxicity of the pesticide, the very important safety information, was found to be 1.5 mm, which is considered to be very uncomfortable to be read. The size of icons were varied from 2 to 12 mm, and the total average size was 4.6 mm. The 149 icons from a total 187 icons (80%) were smaller than the icon presentation guideline ($7mm{\times}7mm$), and the reason for the small icon size might be the small area of the label of the pesticides. Thus, more detailed guidelines for the text size and more practical guidelines for the size of icons are required.

• Journal of the Korea Safety Management & Science
• /
• v.13 no.1
• /
• pp.23-30
• /
• 2011

The purpose of this study was to examine the relationships between MMPI(Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory) scale and safety and health related indices in the shipbuilding workmen. The MMPI scores of the 230 shipbuilding workmen applicants and their performance records regarding safety and health were analyzed through t-test and one-way ANOVA to obtain the following results; (1) applicants intended to show the positive characteristics of their personality, and this attitude reflected a decrease on T-scores of MMPI; (2) there were significant relationships between some MMPI subscales and safety & health related indices. These results can be used to provide baseline information for more effective accident prevention programs.

• Journal of Korean Society of Occupational and Environmental Hygiene
• /
• v.11 no.3
• /
• pp.198-205
• /
• 2001

Many reactive dyes have been used in occupational settings without knowing their toxicity and health hazard information. To investigate the toxicity of reactive dye, C.I.No. Reactive Red 195 was exposed to male and female Sprague Dawley rats by inhalation for 28 days. The rats were exposed C.I.No. Reactive Red 195 for 6 hrs per day and 5days per week. The concentrations for the inhalation exposure were 0, 10, 40 and $160mg/m^3$. After 4 weeks of exposure, rats were examined for exposure related changes through pathology, blood biochemistry and hematology. There were no dose related changes including clinical signs, body weight and relative organ weight changes, hematological and biochemical and histopathological findings. The results indicate that no observed adverse effect level (NOAEL) of 28 days inhalatrion toxicity test for C.I.No. Reactive Red 195 was $160mg/m^3$.

• International conference on construction engineering and project management
• /
• 2013.01a
• /
• pp.60-65
• /
• 2013

Introducing the concept of construction safety in the design/engineering phase can improve the efficiency and effectiveness of safety management on construction sites. In this sense, further improvements for safety can be made in the design/engineering phase through the development of (1) an automated hazard identification process that is little dependent on user knowledge, (2) an automated construction schedule generation to accommodate varying hazard information over time, and (3) a visual representation of the results that is easy to understand. In this paper, we formulate an automated hazard identification framework for construction safety by extracting hazard information from related regulations to eliminate human interventions, and by utilizing a visualization technique in order to enhance users' understanding on hazard information. First, the hazard information is automatically extracted from textual safety and health regulations (i.e., Occupational Safety Health Administration (OSHA) Standards) by using natural language processing (NLP) techniques without users' interpretations. Next, scheduling and sequencing of the construction activities are automatically generated with regard to the 3D building model. Then, the extracted hazard information is integrated into the geometry data of construction elements in the industry foundation class (IFC) building model using a conformity-checking algorithm within the open source 3D computer graphics software. Preliminary results demonstrate that this approach is advantageous in that it can be used in the design/engineering phases of construction without the manual interpretation of safety experts, facilitating the designers' and engineers' proactive consideration for improving safety management.

• Journal of Korean Society of Occupational and Environmental Hygiene
• /
• v.31 no.1
• /
• pp.1-12
• /
• 2021

Objective: The purpose of this study was to contribute to the prevention of occupational diseases through the development of an automatic analysis program for evaluating workers' exposure to hazardous chemical substances. Methods: The authors selected chemical substances that caused occupational disease in Korea and chemical substances that are frequently used in industrial sites as target substances for a GC-MS automatic analysis program. The target substances are organic compounds which can be measured by a passive sampler. The automatic analysis program was studied using various raw data obtained from GC-MS analysis for the target substances. Results: A total of 48 organic compounds that can be measured with a passive sampler were selected as target substances for the GC-MS automatic analysis program. The selected compounds included substances that caused occupational disease, substances related to C1 and D1 in special health examinations, and substances for which work environment measurements have been frequently conducted. The GC-MS automatic analysis program was developed by combining information mainly on retention time and mass spectrum. The GC-MS automatic analysis program is designed to analyze unknown samples by comparing the mass spectrum and retention time of the samples to those of reference materials. To evaluate the stability of the program, samples at about the 30-50% level of OELs were prepared and analyzed with the GC-MS automatic analysis program, resulting in stable results for all 48 organic compounds. Conclusion: An automatic analysis program for a total of 48 organic compounds was developed using a GC-MS system that can analyze organic compounds. Unknown samples that contain the 48 organic compounds can be automatically analyzed by the developed program. It is anticipated that it can contribute to the prevention of occupational diseases through an GC-MS automatic analysis program that can quickly provide workers with information on exposure to chemical substances.