AIRBORNE INVASION

CONFUSED ABOUT HOW TO TACKLE AIRBORNE HEALTH RISKS? PHILIP PA GIBSON, PRINCIPAL SCIENTIST WORK-RELATED HEALTH WITH WORK SAFE NEW ZEALAND, OFFERS A SIMPLE MANAGEMENT MODEL AND NOTES SOME COMMON ERRORS.

THE COMMON refrain is that health risk management is hard – harder than safety risk management. I want to challenge that belief – it’s different but not harder. Good health risk management is a combination of activities that need to work together to be effective.

Under the HSW Act 2015, PCBUs must eliminate (and if not eliminate, minimise) all risks associated with carrying out work. This includes work involving airborne health risks. Health risk management must consider a number of aspects – identification, assessment, control, review – with exposure monitoring being just one of them.

PCBUs must understand and manage the risks of hazardous or toxic substances at work, so any limitations in their knowledge about these risks needs to be recognised and acted on. The information below outlines the key elements of a good health risk management model you can apply at your place of work. When I talk to people who are struggling with health risk management, certain common factors often come up. For example, they might be focusing on just one part of health risk management, not the whole.

Or they might be focusing on things they know (e.g. exposures or health monitoring data) and ignore the thingsgs they don’t know, such as uncertainties in monitoring data or the effectiveness of controls. Following are some examples of classic mistakes I’ve encountered.

IDENTIFICATION

A common observation is some workplaces have safety data sheets (SDS), but don’t read them. m. I was involved in a health risk management prosecution where the business had pages and pages of health and safety risk information in its SDS, but did not use this information to identify its chemical health risks.

( The pictograms alone e – see the ‘exploding chest man’ – could have e alerted them to risk.) Another common identification problem iss not identifying dusts as health risks, especially food-ood-related dusts such as flour dust and other allergenic foods or food additives; while another is assuming that onlyy liquids and gases are hazardous substances. Good health risk management means: • Acknowledging the health risks Safety Data Sheets are telling you are present. Read the descriptions of what the substance can do to a person.

• Researching the potential health risks that could arise because of the process or activity – they may not be covered by an SDS. Not assuming it isn’t hazardous just because it may not be covered by hazardous substances regulations (e.g. food additives, flour dust and green coffee bean dusts are allergenic and can cause asthma) Poor health risk management means: • Ignoring what the SDS is saying about health risk, and just having an SDS because ‘you’re supposed to’. • Not considering what additional health risks arise from the work done (e.g. does heating of chemicals, or a chemical reaction, cause an additional health risk?) If substances not covered by an SDS, or not supplied with one, are not hazardous. • Not identifying all health hazards, including physical, chemical, biological, psychosocial and ergonomic hazards.

RISK ASSESSMENT

The key to health risk assessment for workers is the exposure they actually experience, which requires understanding exposures asa workers move around the workplace and do different tasks. The type of exposure they experience may vvary with different activities, and in different locations loc inside and outside. Their level of exposure will vary as they move closer to or further away from the health risk. Mistakes occur when only a single set of data is used to make judgements