Page 28 - OHS, September 2020

INDUSTRIAL HYGIENE
Breaking Down the Silos to Simplify Industrial Hygiene During COVID-19 and Beyond
OHS practitioners must expand their knowledge and programs to account for industrial hygiene.
BY DAVE RISI
Occupational health and safety professionals have been forced to do more with less long before the COVID-19 global pandemic. Corporate investment support for
traditional industrial hygiene (IH) programs has steadily declined, resulting in many complex IH responsibilities being adapted by technicians and EHS generalists, outsourced to costly consultants or—worst of all—left unmet entirely. Realistically, this trend does not appear to be going away anytime soon; due to COVID-19, many companies have needed to lay off or furlough workers and share job responsibilities across disciplines in order to survive.
Now, more than ever, as an OHS practitioner you must expand your knowledge and skills to be able to manage programs outside of your normal silo to include IH. Fortunately, the growth of smarter EHS software solutions, which is aimed at empowering employees at all levels to improve workplace safety, has made it easier for you to take on more complex tasks.
Let’s take a closer look at how software breaks down the silos to help you run a more effective and efficient IH program now and well into the future.
Simplifying Complex IH Tasks
for Non-IH Professionals
During a recent virtual conference for a EHS software provider, 57 percent of the attendees polled reported having no on-staff IH professionals employed within their companies. These findings fit in with a larger industry trend towards a dwindling number of in- house IH professions and IH programs lacking the resources necessary to properly manage all the requisite IH tasks.
Among the biggest benefits of EHS software is that it makes IH management tasks easier for employees at all levels. Today’s best of breed cloud- based programs make it easy to follow industry best practices, capture data, facilitate the flow of information and provide real-time visibility and reporting into occupational activities.
One way software does this is by simplifying the formation of similar exposure groups (SEGs). Assessing exposures and identifying hazards for individual employees is not practical. A better method is to group those with similar exposures based on location, job and tasks into SEGs. Once defined,
you can then identify which SEGs require medical surveillance, qualitative exposure assessments and additional air sampling. Advanced software programs simplify this process by helping to identify SEGs and perform qualitative exposure assessments that meet your unique IH program needs. They also make it easier to keep historical tracking of each employee’s inclusion in SEGs in order to document exposure histories that help support medical or legal inquiries.
Maintaining a Chemical Inventory
and IH Sampling Plan
Now, more than ever, it is critical to keep a current inventory of what chemicals you have in your work- place. One significant impact of COVID-19 is an ur- gent need for the more frequent use of disinfectants to clean potentially contaminated surfaces to limit the spread of the SARS CoV-2 virus. As a result, work- places have experienced an influx of new cleaning chemicals into their existing inventories.
Knowing what chemicals you already have in your workplace and visibility of any new chemicals entering your facility helps ensure you have all necessary safety data sheets (SDSs), effectively manage workplace labels, train your employees on chemical hazards and meet your regulatory responsibilities.
Having a complete and current chemical inventory list with exposure assessments is also a required when developing your IH sampling plan and will be important to inspectors as well. During compliance inspections, it is common for regulatory compliance officers to ask which chemicals have been recently added to your inventory and whether an exposure assessment has been conducted. While qualitative assessments can reduce the number of samples, they are still needed to document the potential exposure risk and show compliance with the regulations.
As new chemicals arrive, review the information in their SDSs to identify all ingredients that may pose exposure hazards and their relevant occupational exposure limits (OELs) in your IH plan. It is important to not only consider sampling for 8-hour time-weighted average exposures, but also for extended shifts (10 or 12-hour shifts), short- term exposure limits (STELs) and immediately dangerous to life and health (IDLH) concentrations. How this information is incorporated into your IH sampling plan will depend on your operations and
24 Occupational Health & Safety | SEPTEMBER 2020
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