Safety Professional Research Articles

MOdified NARanjo Causality Scale for ICSRs (MONARCSi): A Decision Support Tool for Safety Scientists.

IntroductionWithin the field of Pharmacovigilance, the most common approaches for assessing causality between a report of a drug and a corresponding adverse event are clinical judgment, probabilistic methods and algorithms. Although multiple methods using these three approaches have been proposed, there is currently no universally accepted method for assessing drug-event causality in ICSRs and variability in drug-event causality assessments is well documented.ObjectiveThis study describes the development and validation of an Individual Case Safety Report (ICSR) Causality Decision Support Tool to assist Safety Professionals (SPs) performing causality assessments.MethodsRoche developed this model with nine drug-event pair features capturing important aspects of Naranjo’s scoring system, selected Bradford–Hill criteria, and internal Roche safety practices. Each of the features was weighted based on individual safety professional (n = 65) assessments of the importance of that feature when assessing causality, using an ordinal weighting scale (0 = no importance, 4 = very high importance). The mean and associated standard deviation for each feature weight was calculated and were used as inputs to a fitted logistic equation, which calculated the probability of a causal relationship between the drug and adverse event. Model training, validation, and testing were conducted by comparing MONARCSi causality classifications to previous company causality assessments for 978 randomly selected, clinical trial drug-event pairs based on their respective features and weights.ResultsThe final model test, a two-by-two comparison of the results, showed substantial agreement (Gwet Kappa = 0.77) between MONARCSi and Roche safety professionals’ assessments of causality, using global introspection. The model exhibited moderate sensitivity (65%) and high specificity (93%), high positive and negative predictive values (79 and 88%, respectively), and an F1 score of 71%.ConclusionAnalysis suggests that the MONARCSi model could potentially be a useful decision support tool to assist pharmacovigilance safety professionals when evaluating drug-event causality in a consistent and documentable manner.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (10.1007/s40264-018-0690-y) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

Benefactor or burden: Exploring the professional identity of safety professionals

IntroductionThe professional identity of safety professionals is rife with unresolved contradictions and tensions. Are they advisor or instructor, native or independent, enforcer of rules or facilitator of front-line agency, and ultimately, a benefactor for safety or an organizational burden? Perhaps they believe that they are all of these. This study investigated professional identity through understanding what safety professionals believe about safety, their role within organizations, and their professional selves. Understanding the professional identity of safety professionals provides an important foundation for exploring their professional practice, and by extension, understanding organizational safety more broadly. MethodAn embedded researcher interviewed 13 senior safety professionals within a single large organization. Data were analyzed using grounded theory methodology. The findings were related to a five-element professional identity model consisting of experiences, attributes, motives, beliefs, and values, and revealed deep tensions and contradictions. This research has implications for safety professionals, safety professional associations, safety educators, and organizations.

Evaluating the Performance and Accuracy of Incident Rate Forecasting Methods for Mining Operations

Abstract The potential benefits of a safety program are generally only realized after an incident has occurred. Resource allocation in an organization's safety program has the imperative task of balancing costs and often unrealized benefits. Management can be wary to allocate additional resources to a safety program because it is difficult to estimate the return on investment, especially since the returns are a set of negative outcomes not manifested. One way that safety professionals can provide an estimate of potential return on investment is to forecast how the organizations incident rate can be affected by implementing different resource allocation strategies and what the expected incident rate would have been without intervention. This study evaluates forecasting methods used to predict incidents against one another against a common definition of performance accuracy to identify the method that would be the most applicable to use as part of a safety resource allocation model. By identifying the most accurate forecasting method, the uncertainty of which method a safety professional should utilize for incident rate prediction is reduced. Incident data from the Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) was used to make short- and long-term forecasts. The performance of each of these methods was evaluated against one another to ascertain which method has the highest level of accuracy, lowest bias, and best complexity-adjusted goodness-of-fit metrics. The double exponential smoothing and auto-regressive moving average (ARMA) statistical forecasting methods provided the most accurate incident rate predictions.

June 2016 Safety and Health News Summer 2016

June 2016 Safety and Health News Summer 2016

The Current Experience and Training of Romanian Occupational Health and Safety (OHS) Professionals

The study is about history of health and safety legislation in Romania, about European tools, empowerment procedures, organisations and association in the field. It`s an overview about European tools to allow people free movements all around European Union (EU). The study presents tools which identifies the fundamental skills, the most important abilities and knowledge that people would need to be recognised, in order to allow free movements all around European employment market. The study is about possibilities to be voluntary recognised as a health and safety professionals across EU and why not, around the world. It`s a brief list of ways of transfer and recognition of learning experiences in Europe, including vocational education and training, for a better understanding of qualifications from different EU countries. The research presents ENSHPO (The European Network of Safety & Health Professional Organisations) and EUSAFE (European project) voluntary certification procedures for occupational health and safety professionals (OHS) and where the Romanian practitioners are placed, if their qualifications could be recognised through Europe. The research presents the necessary characteristics for a well developed profession, as mentioned by Ferguson & Ramsay [1] and also presents IOSH, the most valuable health and safety professional association and the necessary steps for Romanian OHS practitioners to build a strong association. IOSH is the model of a profession and Romanian practitioners could learn to become Charted Members. The European Union single market - as well as the increasing number of companies operating across Europe that are applying a consistent set of safety and health standards to their work sites - has created a great need for safety and health managers with credentials that are recognised at a Pan-European level. The absence of a harmonised, agreed system for the mutual recognition of safety & health qualifications at a European level creates uncertainty about professional competence across countries within Europe and may create problems for multinational companies in the effective use of their safety and health expertise. It also forms a barrier for safety and health professionals wishing to offer their services across the EU. Knowing their training level is necessary to determine the training needs of OHS practitioners, now that Romania has joined the EU in order to allow free movement of the work force. Knowing where to start and what needs to be improved, will allow the Romanian practitioners to be just as good and compete with their European colleagues. The study will show which of the Romanian empowerment procedures was better, with or without examinations and if this examination procedures make them better ones. The research is part of a study that aims to thoroughly analyze the transformation in the Occupational Health and Safety (OHS) field in Romania following the major political, economic, social and cultural transformations that are necessary in the context of Romania`s accession to the European Union. The research evaluates the current experience and training needs of Romanian OHS professionals. A review of the changes in the legislation and qualification requirements in Romania will be presented and placed into the context of European legislation and standards.

Developing a competency model for safety professionals: Correlations between competency and safety functions

IntroductionPersonal competency is an important factor influencing individual performance. The objective of this study was to develop a competency model of safety professionals and investigate the factors contributing to their competency to achieve greater safety performance. MethodIn this study, 299 participants (153 safety professionals and 146 safety educators) completed self-administered questionnaires. The response rate was 75%. ResultsThe results of exploratory factor analysis and cluster analysis revealed that the competency scale for safety professionals comprised five factors. Additionally, the factor “safety and health training and management” explained most of the variance in the competency. The multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA) results showed that the respondents’ perception of professional competency was significantly influenced by the following factors: occupation, age, job tenure, level of education, and work status. Additionally, the Pearson product–moment correlation coefficient analysis indicated that a safety professional's perceived competencies and safety functions were positively correlated. Impact on industryThis study discusses possible reasons for the influence of the factors previously mentioned and explains how the results can contribute to the development of safety competencies and curricula.

Health and safety professionals' rating of management attitude and commitment on injury rate and severity in small and medium sized construction companies

ObjectivesTo characterise the impact of health and safety professionals' evaluations of management attitude and commitment to safety on injury rate and severity in construction workers employed by 1360 small and...

Predicting safety culture: The roles of employer, operations manager and safety professional

Introduction: This study explores predictive factors in safety culture. Method: In 2008, a sample 939 employees was drawn from 22 departments of a telecoms firm in five regions in central Taiwan. The sample completed a questionnaire containing four scales: the employer safety leadership scale, the operations manager safety leadership scale, the safety professional safety leadership scale, and the safety culture scale. The sample was then randomly split into two subsamples. One subsample was used for measures development, one for the empirical study. Results: A stepwise regression analysis found four factors with a significant impact on safety culture (R 2 = 0.337): safety informing by operations managers; safety caring by employers; and safety coordination and safety regulation by safety professionals. Safety informing by operations managers (ß = 0.213) was by far the most significant predictive factor. Impact on industry: The findings of this study provide a framework for promoting a positive safety culture at the group level.

Emergency Response for Electrical Safety Professionals

The knowledge of how the emergency response teams function within the incident management (or command) system aids in the planning and preparation stages for an electrical-related incident and, then, in an actual incident itself. The knowledge of how an industrial fire brigade or emergency response team operates is important for electrical safety professionals, as it greatly aids the electrical safety professional with interactions with these teams. A knowledgeable and involved electrical safety professional can greatly improve the effectiveness and preparedness of the response teams in responding to electrical-related incidents.

Occupational and Environmental Medicine in the United States: A Proposal to Abolish Workers' Compensation and Reestablish the Public Health Model

The workers' compensation model of occupational and environmental medicine should be converted to a public health model. Occupational and environmental medicine, as a part of the public health infrastructure,could play a much more substantive part in bringing about a national program to deal with occupational and environmental health. The workers' compensation insurance system could be discontinued at any time,but it will be vital to do so when national health insurance is adopted in the United States. Abolishing workers' compensation would remove the perverse incentives that currently undermine the practice of occupational medicine. Medical care for workers should be provided by health care professionals who are not subject to influence by employers or insurers. Eligibility for benefits should not be determined by health and safety professionals. Wage-replacement benefits for workers should be determined by guidelines established by government and industry that prevent manipulation of health and safety professionals by employers and insurers. A nationwide comprehensive system to track work-related injury and illness, superior to the current reliance on records provided by employers and collated by government agencies, should be adopted. When unusually high rates of injuries, illnesses,and fatalities occur, government inspectors ought to respond and regulate the industry accordingly. Occupational health and safety professional strained in public health can and should participate in these activities, but not when they are in the employ of industry or insurers.

Sustainable production: a proposed strategy for the work environment.

In the future, competitive industries will need to design for environment, health and safety as well as for productivity. Although the new areas of pollution prevention and clean production have evolved to address the design of production processes with concerns for the ambient environment, current pollution prevention models do not include explicit concerns for health, safety, and the work environment. The field of occupational health and safety has much to contribute to improve current pollution prevention approaches and solutions. The application of work environment disciplines will need to be expanded from the conventional focus on "end-of-pipe" assessment and solutions, which take the production processes and resulting hazards as a given, to include a new focus on materials selection and process redesign. To make this shift, a new framework called "sustainable production" is proposed. The basic unit of sustainable production is the production process. The framework integrates a focus on the ambient and work environment along with a focus on productivity and the economic viability of the business enterprise in setting production process design parameters. By shifting the focus of occupational and environmental health and safety from exposure control to process design, sustainable production reduces the likelihood that concerns for health, safety, and the environment will be seen as antagonistic to productivity and economic development. To move a firm toward sustainable production, occupational health and safety professionals will need to participate in interdisciplinary workplace teams that design and build new production processes and that continuously evaluate and redesign existing processes. This new strategy requires an expansion of the role of the occupational health and safety professional to include evaluation and redesign of processes that produce goods and services as well as the conventional evaluation of chemical, physical, and biological agents, work practices, and ergonomics. This expansion of occupational and environmental health and safety requires new research to develop the scientific and public policy basis of sustainable production.

Predicting Biocontainment Requirements for the Future

This paper was first presented as one of four keynote addresses at the 5th National Symposium on Biosafety held in Atlanta, Georgia on January 17–20, 1998 (Richmond, 1998). The Symposium was sponsored by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the American Biological Safety Association (ABSA). The original title of the address “Where are we going?” was selected by the Symposium's planning committee. While contemplation of the future can be an enjoyable intellectual exercise, predictions about the course of science and the corresponding future requirements of biocontainment will yield only uncertain results. Contemporary science has demonstrated that revolutions in science occur with spontaneity. The best recent example is the revolution in the biomedical sciences brought about by recombinant DNA in the 1970s. Scientists cannot predict the next revolution, but they are keenly vigilant to discern its occurrence. Biological safety professionals must be equally prepared to recognize major scientific advancements since the future may require swift changes in the practice of biocontainment as was evident in the recombination DNA revolution. To be prepared, biological safety professionals must establish a continuing and meaningful dialogue with scientists. For this to happen, the biological safety professional must become better informed of current knowledge and strive to gain the trust and respect of the scientific community. Biological safety professionals, as partners in science, can ensure that biocontainment keeps pace with new requirements that will most certainly occur in the future.

Risk is Normal to Life Itself

Health and safety professionals face an enormous challenge. We must communicate about safety in the context of all risks that society faces. The health and safety professional must be scientifically accurate while working in an atmosphere that is frequently emotionally charged. As professionals, we face decisions that force us to balance voluntary risks and externally imposed risks. How do we set “safety levels” in this context? Even more important, are we allowing rational risk decisions to be relegated to computerized risk analyses that have so many compounded errors that common sense tells us the estimates are clearly wrong? Absurd conclusions, of course, lead to loss of credibility in the entire field of risk assessment. In an emotionally-charged environment, perceptions are reality. Perceptions are frequently far from scientific reality, but perceptions are so strongly held that scientific reality alone cannot change opinion. Until risk communicators learn to address perceptions concurrently with scientific reality, we will find little improvement in the general understanding of relative risk and, hence, little acceptance of slight risks. No one has the correct answer to effective risk communication yet, but we must continue the search for optimum communication techniques.

Risk is Normal to Life Itself

Health and safety professionals face an enormous challenge. We must communicate about safety in the context of all risks that society faces. The health and safety professional must be scientifically accurate while working in an atmosphere that is frequently emotionally charged. As professionals, we face decisions that force us to balance voluntary risks and externally imposed risks. How do we set "safety levels" in this context? Even more important, are we allowing rational risk decisions to be relegated to computerized risk analyses that have so many compounded errors that common sense tells us the estimates are clearly wrong? Absurd conclusions, of course, lead to loss of credibility in the entire field of risk assessment. In an emotionally-charged environment, perceptions are reality. Perceptions are frequently far from scientific reality, but perceptions are so strongly held that scientific reality alone cannot change opinion. Until risk communicators learn to address perceptions concurrently with scientific reality, we will find little improvement in the general understanding of relative risk and, hence, little acceptance of slight risks. No one has the correct answer to effective risk communication yet, but we must continue the search for optimum communication techniques.

Adequacy of current industrial hygiene and occupational safety professional manpower

Heated current political discussions of proper staffing and conduct of industrial hygiene and safety programs raise the questions of the numbers and adequacy of available professional manpower. Data from several studies of such professional manpower in the U.S. during the past decade were critically reviewed and compared. Their projected growth rates for industrial hygiene were far short of the actual recent 15%/year growth rate of AIHA membership and of ABIH diplomates, and 27%/year for ABIH trainees. From these studies and census data, it was calculated that in 1977 the ratio of employees to IH professionals was 17 100, and to safety professionals 2200. Also the ratio of professional costs to the value of lost workdays plus workmen's compensation was 1.4% for industrial hygiene and 10.6% for safety. It appears likely that more 1H professionals would be cost effective. Data on outputs of university training programs indicate that the majority of individuals on current staffs were not specifically trained as IH or safety professionals. Although employment demands may be affected by the outcome of ongoing political discussions, there are obvious unsatisfied needs for services. These require professional training of greater numbers than current capacities of university programs permit.

Adequacy of current industrial hygiene and occupational safety professional manpower.

Heated current political discussions of proper staffing and conduct of industrial hygiene and safety programs raise the questions of the numbers and adequacy of available professional manpower. Data from several studies of such professional manpower in the U.S. during the past decade were critically reviewed and compared. Their projected growth rates for industrial hygiene were far short of the actual recent 15%/year growth rate of AIHA membership and of ABIH diplomates, and 27% year for ABIH trainees. From these studies and census data, it was calculated that in 1977 the ratio of employees to IH professionals was 17 100, and to safety professionals 2200. Also the ratio of professional costs to the value of lost workdays plus workmen's compensation was 1.4% for industrial hygiene and 10.6% for safety. It appears likely that more IH professionals would be cost effective. Data on outputs of university training programs indicate that the majority of individuals on current staffs were not specifically trained as IH or safety professionals. Although employment demands may be affected by the outcome of ongoing political discussions, there are obvious unsatisfied needs for services. These require professional training of greater numbers than current capacities of university programs permit.