Measuring Industrial Health Using a Diminished Quality of Life Instrument

Abstract

Historically, the focus of industrial health and safety (H&S) has been on safety and accident avoidance with relatively less attention to long-term occupational health other than via health monitoring and surveillance. The difficulty is the multiple overlapping health consequences that are difficult to separate, measure, and attribute to a source. Furthermore, many health problems occur later, not immediately on exposure, and may be cumulative. Consequently, it is difficult to conclusively identify the cause. Workers may lack knowledge of long-term consequences, and thus not use protective systems effectively. Compounding this is the lack of instruments and methodologies to measure exposure to harm. Historically, the existing risk methodologies for calculating safety risk are based on the construct of consequence and likelihood. However, this may not be appropriate for health, especially for the long-term harm, as both the consequence and likelihood may be indeterminate. This paper develops an instrument to measure the health component of workplace H&S. This is achieved by adapting the established World Health Organization Disability Assessment Schedule (WHODAS) quality of life score to workplace health. Specifically, the method is to identify the likelihood of an exposure incident arising (as estimated by engineering technologists and H&S officers), followed by evaluation of the biological harm consequences. Those consequences are then scored by using the WHODAS 12-item inventory. The result is an assessment of the Diminished Quality of Life (DQL) associated with a workplace hazard. This may then be used to manage the minimization of harm, exposure monitoring, and the design of safe systems of work.

A Methodology for Harmonizing Safety and Health Scales in Occupational Risk Assessment

“…The overall structure of the method is shown in Figure 1. Having adopted a method of risk determination for health in the form of the DQL [12,28], the next was to devise a method to integrate DQL and conventional safety risk assessment. Hence, the second problem with the quality of life approach is the need to integrate it with the other types of assessment, especially of accident safety.…”

“…The risk parameters such as frequency of an incident arising, likelihood of the harm occurrence, and severity of harm were determined from the health and safety representative from the company. We then determined the scale for consequence based on [12], where WHODAS was used to evaluate the level of harm and assist the development of a consistent consequence scale. from the health and safety representative from the company.…”

“…from the health and safety representative from the company. We then determined the scale for consequence based on [12], where WHODAS was used to evaluate the level of harm and assist the development of a consistent consequence scale.…”

Taxonomy of Gas Turbine Blade Defects

“…Ontologies have a wide range of applications and have been successfully applied to measure health and safety risks [27], engineer healthcare and workforce management systems [28], develop software server architectures [29] and emergency event models [30], as a database for gene clustering [31], and to represent multimedia data [32]. No application of blade defects is apparent in the literature.…”

Alignment of the Safety Assessment Method with New Zealand Legislative Responsibilities

“…If instead one applied a medical rehabilitation lens, one could measure the diminished quality of life caused by various levels of harm. Quality of life scales do exist, e.g., WHODAS (which measures a person's ability to function in matters of living) [42], and have been applied experimentally to the risk assessment process [43], but do not support simplistic 1 . .…”