G. Lamson, U.S. DOL/OSHA, Salt Lake City, UT.
Increasing worker awareness of the safety and health hazards they may encounter while performing an emergency response is an important job of safety and health professionals. OSHA has taken a national lead in getting this information to safety and health professionals and directly to the workers themselves via the Internet and CD-ROMs created specifically for response activities.
Following the September 11th attacks and the contamination of several buildings from the handling of several letters containing Bacillus anthracis, OSHA was quick to have worker protection information available on its website, www.osha.gov. This information was also provided to response workers via targeted CD-ROMs that contained the same information but were usable to field responders who did not have access to the Internet. These same tools have been used to disseminate safety and health information to responders involved in various TOPOFF exercises and most recently to workers involved in the clean up and recovery from Hurricane Isabel.
This paper will use recent OSHA web pages as examples to present the process in which content is developed, formatted, reviewed, and approved before being published on both the internal OSHA Intranet and the public OSHA website and how material is selected for publication as a targeted OSHA CD-ROM.
N. Dorris, B. Carnahan, Auburn University, Auburn, AL.
Pictorial symbols can provide safety professionals with an effective means of nonverbally communicating occupational safety information to workers that would have difficulty interpreting this information in a text-based form due to language or educational barriers. The challenge for such professionals is to ensure that the affected workforce can correctly understand the message each safety-related symbol is meant to convey. To this end, the purpose of this research was to develop a novel approach to safety symbol design that utilized interactive evolutionary design (IED) to expand worker participation in the design process while identifying symbol parameters relevant to end-user comprehension. IED is a subdiscipline of artificial intelligence in which the human designer and a computer algorithm “creatively collaborate” with one another to construct pictorial symbols that adequately represent the safety-related message the designer wishes to convey. Two hypotheses were tested using a series of experiments involving student and industrial participants. The first hypothesis was that design parameters of symbols generated using IED would differ based on the gender and ethnic background of the IED user. The second hypothesis was that symbols created using IED would differ from one another in terms of user comprehension testing. In these experiments, participants used IED to design symbols that represented occupational hazards such as falls, toxic fumes, and saw blade lacerations. For each hazard, a design group used IED software to design candidate symbols while a validation group evaluated composites of these symbols using standard comprehension tests. The findings revealed significant differences in symbol parameter values based on designer gender and ethnic background. Results of comprehension testing were similar between design and validation groups with comprehension scores of several IED-generated symbols matching or surpassing those symbols typically used as industry standards. Findings suggest IED can be used to expand worker participation in occupational safety programs.
R. Hartman, U.S. Department of Commerce, Alexandria, VA; T. Morris, U.S. DOD, Frederick, MD.
To support today’s military mission, forward-deployed Special Operations Forces (SOF) health care providers must obtain and provide medical information quickly and securely from remote locations. Currently, SOF health care providers and environmental and occupational health officers are utilizing and evaluating a simplistic medical encounter module, based on a handheld pocket PC 2002 and the Battlefield Medical Information System-Tactical (BMIS-T) to capture medical encounter/exposure data at the point-of-care.
This presentation will describe the potential logistic, technical, and operational obstacles and successes with an operational concept, SOF Health Surveillance System, to systematically collect, analyze, disseminate, and archive personnel health and potential environmental and occupational encounters at the point-of-care or exposure.
The presentation will demonstrate the BMIS-T software and more importantly, validate the necessity for a systematic and comprehensive methodology for data capture, transfer, and storage for any information gathering system.
S. Sehdev, The Regional Municipality of York, Newmarket, ON, Canada.
Health and safety legislation in Ontario places the onus on employers and supervisors to take “every precaution reasonable in the circumstances” for the protection of worker health and safety. To prove this standard of reasonable care, an employer can demonstrate that a proper system to prevent violations has been established—such as the development of policies and procedures, training programs, etc.—and reasonable steps are taken to ensure the effective operation of the system. Many employers are successful at developing a reasonable health and safety program, but fail to follow through with its implementation.
The lack of follow-through is due in large part to the many challenges associated with effectively managing workplace-specific health and safety programs. Ensuring compliance with a multitude of governing regulations and making certain that staff are protected from workplace hazards can be a daunting task. The key challenges for most organizations include: the difficulties associated with internal reporting obligations, communication, and other process issues; strategic planning to ensure customer needs are met; compliance with legislation and corporate policy; and training-related issues.
This presentation explores how one organization has embraced the use of technology by customizing a software program to assist in effectively managing these challenges. York Region is a municipal government located north of Toronto, Ontario, which employs over 2000 staff in such diverse operations as wastewater management, public health, transit, housing, roads maintenance, and social assistance. The Health and Safety Division has co-developed a comprehensive software package that uses modern technology such as online document review, automatic notices for job-specific training, task assignments, multiple deadlines for complex projects, online incident/accident reporting, and escalating e-mail notifications to fulfill workplace safety obligations. This has enabled York Region to take a health and safety leadership role in the municipal world.
G. Gruetzmacher, Wisconsin Division of Public Heatlh, Madison, WI; D. Schleis, E. Maly, Wisconsin State Laboratory of Hygiene, Madison, WI.
The process of taking a written lab report, calculating exposure estimates (using an appropriate model), and tabulating the results in a table for a written report can be a time-consuming process for industrial hygienists. The Wisconsin Occupational Health Lab and the OSHA health consultation project in Wisconsin have developed a pilot project to streamline the process of transferring field sampling data and laboratory results into a format for a written report to the employer.
A web-based application written in PHP is used to extract sampling data from an Oracle database to produce an intermediate XML document. The XML is in turn transformed to an HTML table using XQuery. The HTML table can then be used directly or loaded into a spreadsheet program such as Excel for further manipulation. Standard text describing the sampling methodology is also included in the XML document and can be included in the HTML table.
Future enhancements will provide a web interface to allow consultants to manipulate collection information such as sampling time assumptions and recalculate exposures based on these modified values. Also planned is an interface to allow the transfer of sampling information from handheld PDA devices directly into the laboratory database.
All of these processes should help enhance the productivity of field industrial hygienists in the OSHA consultation program, and allow the consultant more time in the field and less time behind the keyboard.
G. Wolfe, U.S. Department of State, Washington, DC.
An automated tracking system was developed in the U.S. Department of State to assist safety, health, and environmental management staff with field assessments of SH&E programs at over 200 remote locations. The purpose of the system was to improve the timeliness and quality of completed assessments, save time and effort on the part of the field SH&E professional, drive site compliance improvement through online interaction with the automated assessment, and provide summary compliance statistics for management.
The system allows assessments/audits to be completed in the field on a laptop computer. As hazard issues are scored, standard recommendations are automatically inserted for any hazard issue not in compliance. The SH&E professional can modify or add to these recommendations, as needed, and set priorities. The laptop system then generates an action plan that is left with site management.
At headquarters, the assessment is transferred to a central database for final editing and compliance tracking. Once transferred from the laptop to the server, assessments can be peer-reviewed and edited prior to being finalized. Recommendation status can be updated to reflect completion of action items and, over time, the compliance profile of a site can show improvement. Standard reports generated by the system track compliance improvement over time and across assessments. Thus, hazard issues that have chronically deficient scores can be targeted for emphasis training and support programs.
A user-maintenance module allows SH&E management to add, edit, or retire standard recommendations and add or retire the hazard issues evaluated during field assessments. Thus, as new hazard issues arise from accident trends or new regulations, they can be incorporated into all new assessments, along with relevant recommendations.
G. Wolfe, U.S. Department of State, Washington, DC.
Computer-based safety, health, and environmental assessment systems are needed in many organizations to help manage and improve the quality of data collected and tracked during audits at remote locations. Although “shrink-wrapped” applications are available, they may not meet the needs of the organization or pass muster with internal IT system managers and standards, especially if data from remote locations needs to be consolidated in a central database. Using in-house IT resources to develop a customized assessment system (1) satisfactory to users and (2) meeting organizational objectives requires users and developers to work closely together throughout the design, development, test, release, and maintenance stages of the system.
The lessons learned from this process are presented to assist industrial hygienists tasked with developing and implementing a computer-based assessment system in their own organization. Keys to a successful system include: (1) evaluating and re-engineering the current work flow to ensure the system saves users time and effort, (2) educating IT about safety, health, and environmental management, (3) utilizing computer system expertise within the user group, (4) developing detailed system requirements, (5) including “user maintenance” capabilities, and (6) thorough testing before release to the users. Potential pitfalls include: (1) excessive focus on “bean counting,” (2) “phases” not being implemented, (3) user frustration over “bugs,” and (4) inflexible designs.
Posted May 30, 2004