Curious to learn more about conducting workplace exposure assessments? In part two of the series on exposure assessment awareness, 3M’s Katie Hacker sand co-hosts Mark Reggers and Laurie Wells continue their discussion on workplace exposure assessment awareness. Listen in to learn more as they go deeper into exposure standards, monitoring, and other considerations and best practices for conducting exposure assessments. Katie Hacker is a Certified Occupational Hygienist (CIH) with broad experience in diverse industries. She’s currently working in 3M’s Personal Safety Division as the Global Application Engineering Manager for hearing protection, head protection, and eye and face protection.
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.
MARK REGGERS:
Welcome back to all our previous subscribers and 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’m Mark Reggers, one of your co-hosts with the fantastic Laurie Wells with me. We are occupational health and safety professionals who like to ask the questions why, how, and please explain.
Whether you’re 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, then this is the podcast for you.
Laurie, it’s fantastic to be talking with you again. This is something I always look forward to.
LAURIE WELLS:
Well, that’s great, Mark. I can say the same for you. It seems like a long time since we’ve gotten to hear that lovely Australian accent.
MARK REGGERS:
Well, I’m so glad you’ve been missing it. And I’ll make sure I’ll keep it going for our whole episode as well. Can you believe this is our third season doing the Global Science of Safety Podcast? Where did the time go?
LAURIE WELLS:
Oh, it’s quite extraordinary, isn’t? The time just goes so fast when you get to do what you love to do.
MARK REGGERS:
Now, we’ve covered many interesting topics, and I’m no surprise to our listeners that your most favorite ones, I’m assuming, would be the hearing protection or hearing conservation-related ones.
LAURIE WELLS:
Absolutely, Mark. And since we are recording right around the time of World Hearing Day, I hope that our listeners will take a chance to go back and relisten to those or listen to them the first time if you hadn’t and do some World Hearing Day celebrations.
MARK REGGERS:
Now, I’ve got some good news for you, Laurie. We are chatting again with Katie Hacker, continuing our chat on workplace exposure assessments. So, for all our wonderful listeners, if you’ve joined us for the first time, we really do recommend going back and listening to that previous episode. It may make a bit more sense as we continue our conversation with Katie. But for those that may want to power on and continue to listen, Katie, can you please introduce yourself again and tell us a little about your experience, your current role at 3M?
KATIE HACKER:
Sure. Thanks, Mark and Laurie. It’s wonderful to be here and thank you for having me back again; that’s wonderful. My experience, so, I am an industrial hygienist, a certified industrial hygienist for nearly 20 years now. And in these roles I’ve done everything, from doing the workplace assessments to defining and setting company policy. And I know how important it is that we do this well for our employees. In my current role, I work in our Personal Safety Division, in an application engineering manager role and support our hearing, comms, head, eye, and face portfolios.
MARK REGGERS:
Fantastic. Well, thank you for that. And it’s wonderful to hear your experience because I don’t want to try to complicate things here. But in the last episode, we were talking about exposure standards generally based on a worker’s eight-hour exposure. As workplaces, depending on different environments, have workdays longer than eight hours with many up to 12-hour shifts or maybe even longer. So, how do these workplace exposure standards apply or how do they change thinking of these workers with longer exposures for their workday?
KATIE HACKER:
Yes, good pick up there, Mark. Great question. So, as I indicated before, the time weighted average, or TWA, they are based on the assumption that an individual worker is exposed for eight hours a day, five days a week for their entire working lifetime. But in some workplaces, workers may be exposed for these longer periods of time, and in this case, it may be appropriate then to adjust those TWA exposure limits to take into account the longer exposure period and a shorter recovery time. There’s a number of different approaches that you can do. It depends usually on the hazard type and any regulatory requirements. But I would highlight that a workplace should be aware of these adjustment requirements. And if they have questions, talk to an industrial or occupational hygienist or specialist to assist with this. This could be a podcast topic all on its own.
LAURIE WELLS:
I’m sure it well could be. Any other things that workplaces should know when it comes to ways in which monitoring fits into the occupational exposure risk management process?
KATIE HACKER:
There are quite a few things, but here are a few ones that I would highlight. We often do exposure monitoring when your exposure assessment has determined that their exposure is likely to exceed an exposure standard. Whether you have a lot of uncertainty as to whether it could exceed that exposure standard. Or whether there is uncertainty in the literature about the overall health effect.
An optimal monitoring program will provide statistically valid monitoring, which means you’re going to need to collect sufficient numbers of samples. You want to target a representative sampling time so that you take into account things like seasonal variations, different shifts throughout the day, things like nights and weekends versus a day shift. So, all of those things are appropriate to think about when you are doing occupational exposure monitoring.
MARK REGGERS:
From your experience, Katie, would you say that it is preferable to do personal monitoring?
KATIE HACKER:
Generally, yes. And it’s often required to compare it to the exposure standards. But there are other types of monitoring that we would think about as we’re trying to characterize exposure. Things like area samples that aren’t personal exposure monitoring, so area. Maybe we need to do surface sampling, and even looking at biological or physical agents. Then, depending on the hazards, there’s lots of direct-reading instruments that can be used that aren’t considered personal exposure monitoring, but they’re great survey tools that can help us assess a task or a process condition and really help create a picture of things that are contributing to a worker’s overall exposure.
I want to highlight that whatever monitoring method is being used, we must take into account the precision and accuracy of that sampling and analytical method. So, in all cases, we need to make sure equipment that we’re using is calibrated appropriately and maintained. Really, I mean, monitoring is of no value unless the results can be assured and our potential errors can be understood. So, we need quality monitoring.
MARK REGGERS:
A little tip from my personal experience is making sure, if you are using laboratories to analyze any specific samples of concern, that they are also accredited for the tests, that have the right equipment for what they’re doing, and obviously reported in accordance with the recognized standards. You could catch yourself out there if you don’t double-check those types of things.
KATIE HACKER:
Absolutely. A very important point there, Mark.
LAURIE WELLS:
Well, there is certainly a lot that workplaces need to know in this area, and something that I’m sure our listeners are thinking about is, who can go and perform these exposure assessments?
KATIE HACKER:
Great question and an important question. Broadly speaking, exposure assessment and monitoring should be done, needs to be done by appropriately qualified and experienced persons. Most commonly, this is an industrial or occupational hygienist, but expertise would depend on the agents being monitored, the analytical methods that we’re using. So, it could also include people like analytical chemists, microbiologists, ergonomists, and even acoustical engineers, to name a few, who may also participate in this type of monitoring.
Additionally, I should point out that in some countries, the regulations actually specify who can perform the monitoring. And sometimes it’s only by government-authorized people to collect those samples. And sometimes they even specify the laboratories that the monitoring needs to go to, that the samples have to go to. So, if a workplace is unsure where to start, a great place would be a country, industrial, or occupational hygiene association.
A couple of the most well-known associations, just to name a few, would be something like the American Industrial Hygiene Association, the American Conference of Governmental Industrial Hygienists, the British Occupational Hygiene Society, the Australian Institute of Occupational Hygienists, the Canadian Registration Board of Occupational Hygienists, and the New Zealand Society of Occupational Hygienists. Plus, there are many more across Europe, Latin America, and Asian or Asia.
MARK REGGERS:
Sounds like a bit of a tongue twister when you say them all back to back there.
KATIE HACKER:
It really is.
MARK REGGERS:
Now, a common question I’ve gotten over the years, we’re thinking about these contaminants and exposure standards. But what about the contaminants where there is no known or, I guess, regulated exposure standard? And one industry that comes to mind is pharma, pharmaceutical, where they’re creating new compounds and maybe even research environments where they’re creating brand new things. How does it work to approach those types of situations?
KATIE HACKER:
Well, those are big questions there, Mark. Again, we could have a podcast on this topic alone. But I’d say the most common approach or technique in this area is called occupational exposure banding and its associated occupational control banding. It utilizes an approach of anticipation, recognition, evaluation, and control. The same approach, so, it utilizes the same approach in cases where there’s a lack of data on the quantitative exposure or hazard levels.
So, occupational exposure banding utilizes information from things like safety data sheets or the GHS classifications to rank potential hazards into bands that allow us to apply some guidelines for control measures. It has been used effectively for many substances where there is no exposure standards such as in pharmaceuticals, as you mentioned, or maybe another topic like nanomaterials. There are tools out there available for use by– and so some of those organizations that have put out tools, just to name a couple, would be, in the UK, we have COSHH Essentials. There’s also the German REACH-CLP tool. And there’s the NIOSH Occupational Exposure Banding e-Tool that’s available for use.
LAURIE WELLS:
Well, like you said, Katie, it sounds like exposure and control banding could be a topic all on its own. And maybe we should revisit that for future podcasts, we find out things that people are really interested in. But let’s go on to the next step. So, after collecting all this exposure assessment information, which as we talked about, could be a fairly significant undertaking, what’s next?
KATIE HACKER:
Great question, Laurie, and it can be a significant undertaking with many resources and expertise required to do this. When we move into the next stage of evaluation, it’s critical to answer some of the following questions. Is the particular risk from exposure acceptable? Does its existing level meet the regulatory requirements? Will it need controlling in order to reduce the exposure further? Are there special controls that are needed for this type of hazard? How much control do you need? And then what is the most effective mechanism for that particular risk? So, there are many situations where the evaluation will show that no further action is needed and we have control. However, having a formal and systematic approach is often required in order to make those judgments, evaluate, and determine what’s the next step.
MARK REGGERS:
And this is where the information gathered, working through all those key questions and each of those questions are big questions, and could be quite complicated or could be quite simple depending on the workplace and situation. But this has really comes into play for workplaces to be able to prioritize where their focus or where their resources need to be and to work through.
KATIE HACKER:
That’s right. So, with all of this information that we’ve talked about that’s been gathered, it’s really a case of looking at the severity of the consequences and the likelihood of the consequence in order to prioritize where to start and where to allocate your resources and start moving into the control space. The risk evaluation will inform the controls that we’re going to use and will also signal other processes. We have to remember to continually– that this is a continual process. And we need to be updating our risk register and continuing to gather basic characterization and information.
LAURIE WELLS:
So other words, Katie, your work is never done.
[LAUGHTER]
KATIE HACKER:
Great point, Laurie.
LAURIE WELLS:
Well, I think we are done for this particular podcast. And, Katie, we owe you a great thank you. It’s been very informative. I know it’s difficult to encapsulate the wealth of experience and knowledge you have into a very short time and you’re talking about a difficult topic. So really appreciate having you here. It’s been a pleasure.
KATIE HACKER:
Yeah. Thank you, Mark. Thank you, Laurie, for having me and for bringing information on this topic to your listeners. It’s a very big but important topic and having a process in the workplace to protect your workers, to understand all of this, is so important. And I’ll mention just one last time that there are a lot of resources available online from regulators across the globe, as well as those industrial occupational hygiene associations.
MARK REGGERS:
Thank you so much for highlighting that. We don’t want workplaces to feel overwhelmed or feeling alone with some of the topics that we’ve covered because there are a lot of resources and people out there wanting to look after our workers such as ourselves. So, thank you so much again. Katie and Laurie, have a fantastic day and I’ll see you in here you on our next episode of the podcast.
LAURIE WELLS:
Thanks for listening, everyone. You can listen, subscribe to, and share this podcast through Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcast, and most major podcast apps and platforms. If you have questions, topics, suggestions, or you’d 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 visit our website worker health and safety website at 3M.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 safe out there, Mark.
MARK REGGERS:
Stay healthy, Laurie. Thanks, everyone. Bye.
LAURIE WELLS:
Bye-bye.
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