Exposure assessment, a preventive process in managing workplace safety and health, challenges in Ghana

Exposure assessment is a strategy for anticipating, recognizing and evaluating employee exposures to physical, chemical, biological and ergonomic stresses at the workplace, so that effective and “sensible” controls can be put in place to mitigate the risk of occupational injury or occupational illness to the worker. It has been unveiled by this paper that this process is not applied adequately in Ghana and hence, hazards are not properly identified at workplaces. This leads to misapplication of controls or application of inadequate controls which tend not to reduce the risks at workplace. This outlines the various applicable exposure assessment strategies and also recommend controls and conditions that will make the process work in Ghana. It was outlined also that the process starts with the basic characterization which included area characterization, agent characterization and workforce characterization. This helps the industrial safety professional to understand the Similar Exposure Groupings (SEG's) and their corresponding exposure profiles. This makes use of the basic statistics of the sample sizes of the SEG's which get projected to the populations with 95% confidence interval so as to finalize tolerable risks. The modern engineer, the medic, and all relevant professionals must be conversant with this process and hence apply it at the workplace to ensure prevention of adverse exposures to employees, as well as prevention of accidents at the workplace.