Risk Assessment Methods for Occupational Hazards: A Focused Review

Abstract

Risk assessment processes have enormous potential to help employers strengthen their occupational safety and health programs. Managers of occupational safety and health programs seeking ways to stay current on developments in risk assessment may find the only available information source would require reading multiple scholarly journal articles. Six recent advancements provide inform potentially useful to risk-assessment teams. The subject matters of these advancements are: 1) risk-assessment processes, 2) hazard identification, 3) hazard analyses, 4) risk-reduction strategies, 5) risk-assessment matrices, and 6) risk decision support. Each of these advances may contribute to particular attributes of risk-assessment methods. A current challenge is communicating these advances to the managers of risk-assessment teams. To address this challenge, the article provides concise explanations of each advancement and how each advancement contributes to the whole risk-assessment program. An innovation in the article is a process flow chart depicting all the advancements in a single page graphic. This paper is a review type article not a systematic review or a meta-analysis.