Determination of a Quantitative Job Severity Score Value for Health Hazards in Industry

There are numerous types of health hazards in every workplace which threaten the health and well-being of employees. Therefore, various types of engineering and administrative control approaches have been developed in industry. Control of hazardous agents can be difficult in most conditions due to economical and technical limitations. However, certain types of administrative control methods can be implemented in these cases instead of engineering or process controls. Since creating a safe environment with zero chance of occupational exposures to hazardous agents is practically impossible, it can be expected that every employee may have a certain level of exposure to one or more of hazardous agents. The probability and extent of these exposures will depend on job's demands or work environment's conditions. Under this condition, a "job severity score" as a quantitative value can be determined in order to choose and employ the best possible control methodology and also to create a long-term occupational health plan.

In this study, the main goal is to develop a questionnaire as a model for assessment of job severity and tasks harmfulness. This questionnaire has five sections in which there are numbers of questions each with a specified quantitative score. These scores have been identified according to the brainstorming among the some experienced experts in the fields safety, occupational health, and industrial psychology. When the final questionnaire was completed, two well-known industrial sectors were selected as pilot plants for final verification of questionnaire in order to obtain valid questions. Results &

The result of this study was providing a questionnaire which might be used in similar studies for determination of job severity level at any industrial plants.