Health in Construction

A couple of weeks ago I travelled down to Birmngham to give a talk on behalf of the BOHS Breathe Freely initiative at the Health and Wellbeing event at the NEC. The Title of the talk was Managing Health in Construction – What Good Looks Like. An annotated version of the slides I used during

Breathe Freely

On the evening of 28 April, Workers’ Memorial Day, the Breathe Freely initiative, which aims to raise awareness of respiratory disease in the construction industry, was launched at a reception at the Merchant Taylor’s Hall in London. The room was packed with 140 people, mainly representatives from the Construction industry. Breathe Freely is a collaborative

Health and Safety in Engineering

On Tuesday this week I went down to London to represent BOHS at a reception in the House of Commons held to launch a new document on the business case for health and safety in engineering. It was produced by the Inter-Institutional Group on Health and Safety, an organisation made up of representatives from the

Low Toxicity Dusts–Part 2

In my last post I discussed the evidence that suggests that the “trigger values” of 10 and 4 mg/m3 that are widely used as such by many occupational hygienists for “low toxicity dusts” where an official Workplace Exposure Limit (WEL) hasn’t been set, are probably too high to prevent ill health in workers. Despite considering

Design and management of controls

I’ll be making a contribution to the BOHS Conference in Cardiff this year, first thing on the Thursday morning, titled Managing the Design and Implementation of Controls – A Review The usual definition Occupational hygiene is that it is : the discipline of anticipating, recognising, evaluating and controlling health hazards in the working environment with

Risk Management Measures in the real world

At the end of October, I travelled over to Helsinki for a few days. I’d been invited to deliver a short course on “Risk management measures in a REACH context”  to personnel working for the European Chemicals Agency* (ECHA) who are responsible for evaluating the dossiers chemical manufacturers have to submit under the European REACH

Common problems with COSHH assessments

The Control of Substances Hazardous to Health Regulations (COSHH) are undoubtedly the most important legal requirements for occupational hygienists working in Great Britain. They’ve been around for a long time now – the first version being enacted in 1988 – yet, in my experience, there are still many organisations that haven’t completely got to grips

Controlling silica exposure during fettling of castings

In foundries, once  the casting is removed from the mould it is usually necessary to remove excess metal and remedy defects. This process is usually referred to as “fettling” or “finishing”. Fettling normally involves the use of powered hand tools such as chippers and grinders. The operation presents a number of significant risks. Using power

Key steps to control health hazards

At the end of June I was invited to make a presentation to the BOHS workshop on the control of health hazards at work. The key points made are summarised in a previous post. I’ve finally got round to uploading the slides I used to Slideshare. These days I try not to overload my presentations

Reconsidering the “hierarchy of control”– Part 2

In a recent post I discussed the basis of the hierarchy of control and how it should be applied in practice. It’s something we cover when we deliver the BOHS module M103 “Controlling hazardous substances” and is also relevant to the control of physical hazards such as noise and vibration. During the M103 course I’ll