A control banding method for chemical risk assessment in occupational settings in France.

Background: This study describes a method whose aim is to help companies assess the chemical occupational risks related to labeled products and industrial chemical emissions. The method is intended to be used by industrial hygienists at the scale of one company. Both inhalation and cutaneous exposure routes are taken into account. Methods: The method relies on a control-banding scheme. A work situation is described by exposure parameters such as the process or the local exhaust ventilation and by the hazard of the product. Each possible value of the parameters is associated with a "band," which is associated with an integer value. The multiplication of these values results in a score, which represents a priority for intervention. The higher the score, the more the situation warrants investigation for implementing prevention measures, such as chemical substitution and the addition of local exhaust ventilation. To simplify communication, the priority is associated with a colored priority band: red for "very high priority," orange for "high priority," and green for "moderate priority." The priority bands are computed for all work situations performed in a company. Results: An example of the use of this method is described in a French façade insulation company. Conclusion: A tool named Seirich was developed to implement this method and promote good practices for helping industrial hygienists in the prioritization of interventions for reducing chemical risk in France.

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.