Previous Global Science of Safety podcast episodes have explored anticipating and recognizing potential workplace hazards. Another critical step in the framework for managing risks in the workplace is evaluating hazards. In this episode of the Global Science of Safety podcast, co-hosts Mark Reggers and Laurie Wells, along with guest Katie Hacker discuss exposure assessment. Having a systematic method to evaluate and characterize workplace exposures to chemical, physical and biological agents is fundamental to occupational health and safety programs. Tune into part one of this two-part series on exposure assessment awareness to learn more about this important aspect of workplace health and safety. Katie Hacker is a Certified Occupational Hygienist (CIH) and Global Application Engineering Manager in 3M’s Personal Safety Division.
This global podcast series provides another educational tool that can help increase your knowledge and is something that you can share with others in your organization and with your friends. The goal is to help provide a global perspective and foundation for those of you who are new to workplace health and safety and personal protective equipment (PPE) while also providing information for more experienced professionals who handle complex health and safety challenges.
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Around the world, we aim to help everyone get the job done safely today, tomorrow and in the future.
Below is the full transcript of the podcast:
Presenter:
The 3M Science of Safety Podcast is a free publication. The information presented in this podcast is general only should not be relied upon to make specific decisions. Listening to this podcast does not certify proficiency in safety and health. You should always seek the advice of a licensed or certified professional in relation to your specific work or task. Always consult the user instructions for any personal protective equipment you are using and follow local laws and regulations. Information presented is current as of the date of the podcast and requirements can change in the future. 3M owns all rights to the podcast, and any reproduction is strictly prohibited without permission.
Laurie Wells:
Welcome back to our previous subscribers and welcome to our new listeners. The Science of Safety Podcast is presented by the 3M Personal Safety Division. This is a podcast that is curious about the science and systems behind workplace health and safety with a focus on personal protective equipment or PPE used to help keep workers healthy and safe. I am Laurie Wells, one of your co-hosts, and I have the great pleasure to have Mark Reggers with me as well. We are occupational health and safety professionals who like to ask questions Why, How, and Please Explain whether you are a safety, professional, occupational or industrial hygienist, someone with any level of worker health and safety responsibility in your workplace, a user of PPE or a health and safety nerd like us, this is the podcast for you. Well, hello, Mark. I hope you’re doing well. It’s been a long time.
Mark Reggers:
It has been a while. How’s things in your part of the world in beautiful Colorado?
Laurie Wells:
Well, things are going great, and it’s especially exciting time of year because we’re celebrating World Hearing Day.
Mark Reggers:
Excellent. What did you do or what do you normally do for World Hearing Day?
Laurie Wells:
Well, World Hearing Day is a celebration of ear and hearing care, trying to advocate for people to get access to ear and hearing care and appreciate their hearing and of course, protect their hearing from hazardous sound. So we’ve been just thinking about the lovely sounds that we want to continue to enjoy.
Mark Reggers:
Excellent. And given your passion, it would be an exciting time of year to focus all your energy onto those things to help promote that.
Laurie Wells:
Absolutely. But today we’re talking about something different. A couple of episodes ago we spoke with Lucre Pfefferman from your neck of the woods, from 3M New Zealand about hazard awareness, and we covered in detail the anticipation and recognition for workplaces. Of course, if our listeners haven’t listened to that episode, then you certainly can go back and take a listen, but we’d like to continue with that theme. So Mark, what follows for workplace after this?
Mark Reggers:
That is a very good question, which is why today we’re going to be chatting all about workplace exposure assessments with Katie Hacker. Welcome, Katie. Please introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about yourself and your role at 3M.
Katie Hacker:
Yeah, hello, Mark and Laurie. It’s wonderful to be here. I’ve been an industrial hygienist for over 20 years, and I’m a certified industrial hygienist, and I started my career in oil and gas industry where I managed IH programs like hearing conservation, chemical exposure management, and respiratory protection. I came to 3M and went into our Knoxville, Iowa IATD plant, and I still reside in Iowa today. And at the plant I was what’s called an IH specialist, and I also supported many safety programs there as well. So some of my favorite experiences when thinking about my time there were working with our employees to sample airborne exposures or looking at our noise exposures and designing or implementing the new exposure controls to help protect them. I really loved the day-to-day employee interactions. My last eight years at 3M, I’ve been in IH leader roles supporting other IHS in our facilities, and most recently providing direction on our IH objectives and IH goals. And now I’m in a wonderful position in our Personal Safety Division as a global AE manager, and I support the businesses for hearing protection and communications and also head eye and face products.
Laurie Wells:
Welcome Katie. We really appreciate that you’re taking some time out of your busy schedule to share some of that wealth of experience and knowledge with us. So let’s think back to those steps that Lucre discussed last year about anticipation and recognition. So tell us what comes next for a workplace after these?
Katie Hacker:
Sure. Following anticipation and recognition comes the evaluation stage. The key elements of the evaluation stage really are characterization of the hazards, exposure assessment, comparing that information against occupational exposure limits that we often refer to as OEL, and an overall risk evaluation.
Laurie Wells:
Well, it sounds like these are really important for workplaces to be aware of.
Katie Hacker:
They sure are Laurie . Risk and exposure assessments are really at the heart of occupational health and hygiene programs, so having a systematic method to characterize the exposures to things like chemical, physical, and biological agents is really fundamental to a program. With a thorough and organized characterization of your hazards occupational health program resources can more effectively be prioritized and allocated to make sure you’re reducing worker health risks. This could include things like improving your training programs, improving execution of medical surveillance programs, even effective purchase and implementation of control measures, and just having data to evaluate your program’s effectiveness.
Mark Reggers:
So that first step you mentioned was characterization. Where does a workplace start or what does this actually involve in an actual practical sense of things?
Katie Hacker:
Yeah, great question. It starts with what we call it basic characterization, and it involves gathering information about the workplace, the workforce, and the agents that are used in the operations. So, it may be accomplished as part of job hazard analysis processes that you already have, or it could be a distinct activity, but it involves describing and evaluating the exposure potential in the workplace and documenting that in an organized manner.
Mark Reggers:
For a workplace, where would I even start to look at some of this information about evaluating exposures or getting some of this information? Because it can be quite overwhelming.
Katie Hacker:
Of course. Yeah. Workplaces use information often that they’ve gathered in the anticipation and recognition stage to develop what they call similar exposure groups or segs or S E Gs as they’re commonly referred to. So an seg is a defined group of workers, two or more, that are similarly exposed. That usually means that they have similar tasks, equipment and chemicals that they work with. Usually SEG development will involve consultation with supervisors, with workplace representatives and the employees themselves. And you may have multiple SEGs or multiple segs, or you can have many, it depends on the complexity of the workplace and the range and type of exposures that you have. We have to keep in mind that workers are often exposed to more than one hazard at a time and maybe part of more than one seg or SEG.
Laurie Wells:
Yeah, these segs are really a common tool, and I’ve encountered them primarily with noise exposure in my experience. We’re really trying to understand where the workers are, what they’re doing and what their exposures are. So, what else beyond defining the segs can the workplaces do?
Katie Hacker:
A next step would be to really develop a site-specific risk register of all of these basic characterization that you gathered and the health risks of those physical, chemical and biological agents. So physical being noise, and then you assess the risk to those individual segs or SEGs. So this risk register, you would also document things, like existing controls that you have and inherent or residual risks and maybe proposed controls that you would like to see added. So, essentially you’re building a summary of the status of your health management program at the workplace, and this really helps you further develop or prioritize what happens next. So it’s a systematic gathering of the information into what we would call a risk register so that you can start to take some actions or make some determinations.
Laurie Wells:
These are really helpful tips that I’m sure many workplaces will be able to look at and get a place to start. So next, you mentioned exposure assessment. What does that entail and why is it so important, Katie?
Katie Hacker:
Exposure assessment is a component of the overall risk assessment process, and it characterizes really who’s exposed and how much they’re exposed to. It’s incredibly important as the actions that need to be taken will be based on what your exposure assessment shows. It can be qualitative, or it can be quantitative, as in the case of exposure monitoring. Exposure monitoring is not necessarily essential to the overall exposure assessment, but many occupational exposures can be assessed without monitoring data. Traditional strategies have emphasized personal monitoring in order to measure the exposure to airborne contaminants or noise, but modeling techniques are also widely accepted and may actually help when you’re prospectively assessing an exposure that hasn’t started yet. So maybe you’re introducing something new into the workplace and you can’t take quantitative data yet. So qualitative risk assessment may be used to really screen exposure risks and set priorities.
Mark Reggers:
I think it’s probably fair to say or safe to say that when most think about exposure monitoring, it’s about trying to quantify those exposures, what they may be, and compare them to a relevant exposure standard. Would that be the case?
Katie Hacker:
That’s very true. Being able to show compliance to relevant exposure standards does require exposure monitoring in most cases.
Mark Reggers:
Now, it might be useful to explain what is an occupational exposure for our listeners, if you can do that as well.
Katie Hacker:
Sure, not a problem. So thinking of airborne hazards, an occupational exposure or standard or a limit is often defined as a level to which nearly all workers can be exposed day after day for their working lifetime without experiencing any adverse health effects. And across the globe, different countries use different terms for an exposure standard. Some of these terms may include things like an occupational exposure limit or OEL, threshold limit value or TLV, permissible exposure limit like a PEL, a workplace exposure standard like a WES or a workplace exposure level like a WEL, just to name a few.
Laurie Wells:
Wow, that’s so many of them. This is probably a really good time to remind our listeners that it’s really important that they check their local requirements and use the terminology that’s reflected in their own local requirements.
Katie Hacker:
I should also add that these exposure standards are not a fine dividing line between what’s safe and hazardous, nor are they a measure of relative toxicity. The basis on which the individual standards are set can differ from substance to substance. Also, I should note some may have been established many years ago and do not consider more recent toxicity testing or hazard studies. So understanding the basis of the exposure limit is really an important step as well, but it is very important to still reference this metric as part of your risk assessment.
Laurie Wells:
So, I understand that there are different types of exposure standards as well. Is that right, Katie?
Katie Hacker:
That’s right. And exposure standard generally takes one of three forms. The first and most prevalent is a time weighted average. This is an eight hour weighted average exposure standard, which is the average airborne concentration of a particular substance permitted over an eight hour working day and a five day working week. So the exposure may still have periods of ups and downs or high exposure and low exposure with the TWA then being the average of those ups and downs. And this is the most common, the TWA is the most common exposure standard that we see.
Mark Reggers:
Yes, absolutely. TWA is quite a common term. So that was the first one. What’s the next one of the three that you mentioned?
Katie Hacker:
The next is short-term exposure limit or STEL, and this is the time weighted average or maximum average a concentration of a particular substance over a 15 minute period. STELs as they’re referred to, are established to minimize the risk of intolerable irritation or irreversible tissue change. So think about a task when you’re measuring a STEL. So exposure at still should not be longer than 15 minutes and should not be repeated more than four times a day with at least 60 minutes between those successive STELs.
Mark Reggers:
And the third one of the three.
Katie Hacker:
Then we have what we call the ceiling, and it can be known by other names. It’s really a maximum or peak airborne concentration of a particular substance that can be measured as quickly as possible like a grab sample, but no more than 15 minutes of sample time. And this is a, what we call, a ceiling because it should not be exceeded at any time. Then for many of these chemical substances that have exposure standards, they are also classified by known or presumed or suspected carcinogens, or can be respirator or skin sensitizers. So, lots of different aspects. Workplaces need to assess exposures for all the different contaminants that workers may be exposed to on the job.
Laurie Wells:
So, Katie, you’ve been talking about respiratory hazards, but what about noise exposure assessments?
Katie Hacker:
Very important. We cannot forget about noise exposure assessments similar to respiratory standards when it comes to noise exposure or maximum allowable dose to noise. We need to assess what is the average noise exposure over the eight hour period or the LAeq or LAQ, depending, this is the average, again, of all the ups and downs of a weighted noise during that period. What this number is will vary, or the limit of your noise exposure will vary across the world. But most commonly, the limits are 85 decibels, A weighted scale or 90 decibels on the A weighted scale averaged over eight hours. Then we also have the peak noise exposure level where workers should not exceed this noise at any point. This is really thinking about a loud impact noise or an impulse noise where it may cause immediate damage to the ear. Impact noises may be something like a nail gun or some metal on metal impact and impulse noise may be a gunshot thinking about many of our law enforcement and military type environments.
Laurie Wells:
Well, thanks for covering those. And it does highlight that there are different hazard types and different standards. So, you’ve talked about chemical or airborne and noise. Are there other ones?
Katie Hacker:
That’s right, Laurie. There are. There’s other standards and guiding levels for vibration, lighting, radiation, and thermal, just to name a few of those. When conducting these health risk assessments and exposure assessments, we should consider all the different things that can impact a worker’s health, and then of course, what are the controls that we have in place or need to put into place. I also want to highlight that these exposure standards for all these different hazard types can vary across the globe. So be sure to know your local requirements and what is the current state of the information as this can change and as research continues to grow and our knowledge base grows.
Laurie Wells:
Well, Katie, thank you so much. This has been very informative and it’s been quite a pleasure to have you on the podcast.
Katie Hacker:
Thank you for having me and for bringing information on this topic to our listeners. It’s very big, but important topic and a process workplaces need to have a good understanding of to protect workers. I want to mention there’s a lot of resources available online from regulators across the globe as well as industrial or occupational hygiene associations.
Mark Reggers:
That’s a good point to make. Katie, there is lots of fantastic resources out there to help workplaces. But look, thank you so much, Katie. Laurie, have a fantastic day in beautiful Colorado, and I’ll see and hear you on our next episode of the podcast. Well, thanks for listening, everyone. You can listen, subscribe to, and share this podcast through Apple Podcast, Spotify, Google Podcast, and most major podcast apps and platforms. If you have any questions, topic suggestions, or like some assistance in your workplace when it comes to the appropriate selection, use, and maintenance of PPE, you can get in contact with this podcast by contacting your local 3M office or visiting our website mmm.com. Around the world we aim to help everyone get the job done safely today, tomorrow, and in the future. Thanks for listening and have a safe day. Stay healthy, Laurie.
Laurie Wells:
Stay safe and sound Mark.
Mark Reggers:
Thanks everyone. Bye
Laurie Wells:
Bye-Bye.