Tyler McCord, EHS Chemical Industrial Hygienist, Published in "Annals of Work Exposures and Health"

August 25, 2020 - L. Brownlee

Tyler McCord, EHS Chemical Industrial Hygienist, Matthew Legaspi, Elaine West, Priscilla Yun, Diana Larson, Samuel Paik, and David Zalk’s study on Quantitative Validation of Control Bands Using Bayesian Statistical Analyses was published August 21, 2020 in the Annals of Work Exposures and Health.

Help us to congratulate them on this outstanding accomplishment. Abstract provided below.

Abstract

This study presents a quantitative validation of 15 Similar Exposure Groups (SEGs) that were derived via control bands inherent to the Risk Level Based Management System currently being used at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. For 93% of the SEGs that were evaluated, statistical analyses of personal exposure monitoring data, through Bayesian Decision Analysis (BDA), demonstrated that the controls implemented from the initial control bands assigned to these SEGs were at least as protective as the controls from the control band outcomes derived from the quantitative data. The BDA also demonstrated that for 40% of the SEGs, the controls from the initial control bands were overly protective, thus allowing controls to be downgraded, which resulted in a significant saving of environmental safety and health (ES&H) resources. Therefore, as a means to both confirm existing controls and to identify candidate SEGs for downgrading controls, efforts to continuously improve the accuracy of Control Banding (CB) strategies through the routine quantitative validation of SEGs are strongly encouraged. Targeted collaborative efforts across institutions and even countries for both the development of CB strategies and the validation of discreetly defined SEGs of commonly performed tasks will not only optimize limited ES&H resources but will also assist in providing a simplified process for essential risk communication at the worker level to the benefit of billions of workers around the world.

The Article Can be found at https://academic.oup.com/annweh/advance-article-abstract/doi/10.1093/annweh/wxaa081/5895198?redirectedFrom=fulltext