A holistic view and evaluation of health and safety at work: Enabling the assessment of the overall burden

Abstract

The social burden of unsafe and unhealthy workplaces is extremely high, with more than a billion victims of work-related illnesses per year, but a unified and comparable view of workers’ unsafe and unhealthy loads is still missing. This paper proposes a holistic approach that enables the comparison of Health and Safety (H&S) matters by quantifying the expected damage through a unique consistent indicator (R), that is, the average number of potential lost days of a worker in a working configuration. Evaluating risks of working configurations and then defining the overall company risks, enables decision-makers to quantitatively assess the burden to make well-grounded decisions for far-sighted strategies enhancing H&S. This study proposes a four-step process that finally returns the overall risk level (R) in terms of number of lost days. These steps are structured in a way that can be implemented regardless of any contexts’ features; their actual implementation, instead, will require a quantification that is assumed to be context – country at least – dependent because it will be grounded on potentially different available datasets. An example is provided in the paper, that fits the four-step process into the Italian context, by combining three types of risks – impact, cutting, and noise – under the same indicator (R). The approach has great potential for future applications in real working contexts. The four-step process has the potential to be used as a practical tool to assess the economic impact of the actual risk load over the years.