Risk Communication

Abstract

Environment, health, and safety (EHS) professionals have dedicated their careers to develop the skills, knowledge, and abilities necessary to become effective specialists. Although communication of risk is an important component of their chosen discipline, little time is dedicated to the educational process to teach effective strategies for having a constructive dialog with workers. Learning how to communicate risk with workers is probably the most important lesson for field practitioners to learn if the end goal is achieving recognition, control, and long‐term prevention of workplace hazards. Risk communication challenges faced by individual EHS disciplines can vary greatly and are further affected by the type of audience, message delivered, and how well the information is understood. Presented are models and strategies that assist in simplifying and standardizing the language that can be used by EHS professionals for communicating risk to any audience. In addition, these risk communication strategies can also benefit discussions within and between EHS disciplines, to enhance a multidisciplinary risk management program. A clear and consistent risk communication helps to ensure that all those listening can understand the risks being communicated and comprehend what their roles and responsibilities are to ensure workplace risks are minimized or eliminated.

Barrier Banding: A Concept for Safety Solutions Utilizing Control Banding Principles

“…64 ■ BARRIER BANDING IN THEORY, PRACTICE, AND APPLICATION There is a consensus that risk banding, especially when we begin thinking of the banding of barriers for occupational safety synonymously with banding of controls for industrial hygienists, can help SME's to generate knowledge in the nature and priority for multidisciplinary OSHH risks among workers and managers alike. 35 Therefore, the concept of BB in safety must in theory be considered a management tool to prioritize resources toward the highest risk outcomes and not to be considered the final solution. 26 Consideration should be given to more than one effort to further a safety BB process, in line with the examples given in Table 1 and perhaps developed in parallel, to prioritize intervention and solutions-based tools as equally essential components requiring collaborative efforts.…”

“…If all these right side barriers fail, then the consequence of occupational illness or disease results. Therefore, when the bow-tie is viewed as a multidisciplinary risk communication model, the role of barriers is seen as a progressive, disciplinary independent process that together seek prevention of an unwanted consequence of either a work-related injury, illness, or disease . With the prevention of work-related adverse consequences being the basis, to address multidisciplinary applications this discussion will consider the use of the term barriers as a representation of the left side of the bow-tie and controls the term used for describing the right side of the model.…”

“…This qualitative risk assessment tool has now been quantitatively validated and serves as a gold standard for preventing work-related exposure to nanomaterials. , Reaching across the OSHH disciplines, this matrix is also the basis for BB ,, and a burgeoning multidisciplinary approach for an occupational risk management construction toolbox. ,, This RL matrix has also been determined to be best suited for the unique needs of a health and safety management system with a multidisciplinary OSHH workforce . It provides versatility as a tool of risk communication in addressing complex issues like performing qualitative environmental risk assessment, and assessing pharmaceutical and nanomaterial exposures down to more common, high-repetition, multidisciplinary approaches like in the construction industry. ,, The RL matrix also calibrates OSHH professional risk perceptions when working as a multidisciplinary team, reduces among-discipline variability, or, statistically put, reduces the Type II error of producing a false positive, when the assumption is that disciplines will respond the same, but in reality do not …”

“…There is a consensus that risk banding, especially when we begin thinking of the banding of barriers for occupational safety synonymously with banding of controls for industrial hygienists, can help SME’s to generate knowledge in the nature and priority for multidisciplinary OSHH risks among workers and managers alike . Therefore, the concept of BB in safety must in theory be considered a management tool to prioritize resources toward the highest risk outcomes and not to be considered the final solution .…”

“…7 It provides versatility as a tool of risk communication in addressing complex issues like performing qualitative environmental risk assessment, and assessing pharmaceutical and nanomaterial exposures down to more common, high-repetition, multidisciplinary approaches like in the construction industry. 35,42,48 The RL matrix also calibrates OSHH professional risk perceptions when working as a multidisciplinary team, reduces among-discipline variability, or, statistically put, reduces the Type II error of producing a false positive, when the assumption is that disciplines will respond the same, but in reality do not. 7 ■ BANDING OF BARRIERS Barriers are hardware control measures and human interventions, which will block or influence the development of a scenario.…”