The UK Health and Safety Executive’s developing approach to occupational hygiene – the measurement of exposures to chemicals, dust and other exposures at work – has come in for scathing criticism.
Hans Kromhout, based at Utrecht University’s Institute for Risk Assessment Sciences, said he was ‘amazed’ to hear an HSE presentation on ‘hygiene without numbers’. Writing in the Annals of Occupational Hygiene, he indicated the approach fell in line with the UK government’s attack on ‘red tape.’ He added: “The old mantras of ‘measurements are expensive’, ‘measurements delay control measures’, ‘with statistics you can prove anything’, and of course ‘if you provide enough guidance on best practices everything will be well-controlled’ made up the gist of the message.”
Kromhout noted: “Such numberless interventions may be appealing to policymakers, who face the hefty task of creating meaningful and economically feasible guidelines for workplace health. However, treating workers’ exposure to chemical, biological, or physical agents as a static entity that can be satisfactory controlled by guidance sheets is factually wrong and ignores the intrinsic variability of occupational exposure.”
His paper concludes: “Preventing occupational hygiene to follow the path of demise like its sister discipline occupational medicine in the UK should be our first priority. Cutting red tape – resulting in fewer carefully inspected and controlled European workplaces – may ‘solve’ the issue of the burden of collecting numbers in the short term, but this is likely to produce thousands of preventable cases of occupational disease and untimely disability. ‘Hygiene Without Numbers’ comes with a price and we all know who will have to pick up the bill.”
Kären Clayton, director of HSE’s long latency health risks division, has made a number of recent conference presentations referring to the ‘hygiene without numbers’ theme.
- Hans Kromhout. Commentary: Hygiene without numbers, Annals of Occupational Hygiene, published online ahead of print, 2016. doi:10.1093/annhyg/mev096