The design of a matrix linking work situations to chemical health risk at the workplace

In France, laws require each company to draw up an inventory of the risks that may threaten employees’ health in order to prioritize the preventive actions to be implemented. Focusing on chemical risk, databases on hazards or exposures are widely available but they lack information regarding chemical risks resulting from combining the hazards of chemicals with their conditions of use, thus generating exposures. Our objective is to build a matrix of French work situations associated with their chemical risk. Eighty-eight work situations were collected from reports written by professionals from the French public health insurance service. Each work situation is defined by descriptive parameters of the task, the exposure, and the hazard. According to an expert elicitation method (Delphi, n = 21 experts), each work situation was assessed and a chemical risk score defined, taking into account all the descriptive exposure and hazard parameters. Chemical risk scores were expressed as a range of values from 0 to 100, with the size of the range chosen by the experts themselves according to their uncertainty. The experts' assessments were merged to assign one risk score for each work situation, variability, and confidence. The results showed that 50% of the work situations had a risk score between 40 and 60. The average variability and confidence were around 15% and 82%, respectively. This work situation matrix constructed from French data can be used by occupational safety and health managers that have similar work situations in their company (Western European industrial sector). In this context, it may be useful to easily determine the level of risks for similar tasks and prioritize those that are most risky. Moreover, it could be used to compare and define the differences between a risk assessment performed by "expertise" and another defined by a software.

在法国，法律要求每家企业编制一份可能威胁员工健康的风险清单，以优先确定需落实的预防措施。针对化学风险领域，现有危害或暴露相关数据库已较为普及，但这类数据库缺失了化学品危害与其使用条件相结合所产生的暴露相关的化学风险信息。本研究旨在构建关联法国工作场景与其化学风险的矩阵。研究从法国公共健康保险服务机构专业人员撰写的报告中收集了88个工作场景样本，每个工作场景均通过任务、暴露与危害三类描述性参数进行界定。本研究采用专家征询法（德尔菲法，Delphi，共21名专家），综合考量所有暴露与危害的描述性参数对每个工作场景进行评估，并确定其化学风险评分。化学风险评分以0至100的区间值形式呈现，区间跨度由专家根据自身的不确定性程度自行确定。研究整合专家的评估结果，为每个工作场景赋予单一风险评分、变异性与置信度。结果显示，50%的工作场景的风险评分处于40至60区间内，平均变异性与置信度分别约为15%与82%。本研究基于法国数据构建的工作场景矩阵，可被西欧工业领域内企业中拥有同类工作场景的职业安全与健康管理人员使用；在此背景下，该矩阵可用于快速判定同类任务的风险等级，并优先管控高风险任务。此外，该矩阵还可用于对比并明确“人工专家评估”与“软件评估”两类风险评估结果之间的差异。