Introduction / background / objectives

Risk assessment in the workplace is a fundamental step towards obtaining safer and healthier jobs. The Security Technicians are generally the most experienced in this context; however, not all the professionals that carry out Occupational Health activities present well-structured and/ or practical knowledge about most of these methods. The purpose of this review was to summarize the main techniques used in this context.

Methodology

This is a review, initiated through a survey conducted in April 2020, in the RCAAP database (Open Access Scientific Repositorie in Portugal).

Content

The author made some practical considerations about MARAT (Methodology for Risk Assessment and Accidents at Work), William Fine, MIAR (Integrated Methodology for Risk Assessment) and FMEA (Failure Mode and Effect Analysis), valuing with explanatory tables and highlighted the slight discrepancies between the documents consulted.

Conclusions

The keywords used were related to the methods that the author briefly know; in the documents found, sometimes, other techniques have been included; this obviously implies a bias selection.

We easily find articles in indexed databases that mention these methods, but due to the limits imposed by most journals (relating to the size of the document), almost all authors only mention the name of the method or, at most, use a very synthetic description of it. In turn, in some Master's or Doctorate Theses (where this problem does not exist) we can find a more methodological description, but still, sometimes you cannot always get the practice knowledge of how to use all methods or if the items are slightly different, result of adaptations, consideration of different subtypes or a mixture of methods, carried out over the decades.

Any professional on an Occupational Health Team will have a reasonable sense of what the most damaging tasks will be; however, presenting this evidence, attenuating subjectivity and making use of the hierarchy that mathematical scales can offer, it becomes more accepted as valid by employers/ representatives/ workers and, consequently, increase the receptivity to proposed measures to mitigate/ correct the problem and reassess it, after introducing corrective measures.

It would be desirable for all professionals in the field to have (at least) a generic idea of ​​the existing methods and where they can seek more information, in order to execute these techniques, when necessary.

        · resumen en Portugués     · texto en Portugués     · Portugués ( pdf )