Get Your Plan in Place to Reevaluate Industrial Hygiene Data
Determining when to reassess employee exposures is a challenge that many with industrial hygiene responsibilities face.
- By Beth Angus
- May 01, 2022
You did it! A whole exposure assessment from start to finish. You’ve received the sampling results from the laboratory, notified your employees and submitted a corrective action plan based on the results to your supervisor. You’ve checked it off your list once and for all—but are you done?
Maybe you’ve found a treasure trove of sampling data: multiple studies over the years, collected by your predecessor, catalogued into tidy exposure groups and archived alongside detailed qualitative assessments. Let it be? Or should you take another look to make sure your employees are as safe as they can be and your company is OSHA compliant?
You lean back in your desk chair, considering the numbers in front of you, and questions pop up in the back of your mind: is this it? Is this the true picture of the exposures in my facility? What if I need to sample again? How will I know?
Depending on the hazard you monitored, your reassessment schedule may be dictated by a regulatory schedule. OSHA has sampling frequency requirements for several chemicals, including silica, hexavalent chromium, lead and formaldehyde. For most agents with prescribed schedules, OSHA has the following requirements:
- Every three months for exposures greater than the Permissible Exposure Limit
- Every six months for exposures between the Action Level and the Permissible Exposure Limit
But what if you’re looking at exposures outside of OSHA’s limited list of specific standards? How do you decide if you need to reassess?
Determining when to reassess employee exposures is a challenge that any health and safety professional with industrial hygiene responsibilities faces. Exposure assessments must be updated as the work processes evolve (e.g., operational changes, new equipment is adopted, etc.), materials change and as employees turn over or adapt to new working conditions. Health and safety professionals have the responsibility to decide what conditions trigger a reassessment.
Quantitative Data
One of the easiest methods for determining when and what exposures to re-evaluate is to develop a matrix based on your already existing exposure results. The American Industrial Hygiene Association (AIHA) recommends the following matrix in their “A Strategy for Assessing and Managing Occupational Exposures,” 4th Edition:
This article originally appeared in the May 2022 issue of Occupational Health & Safety.