The integrated assessment of occupational risks in a pharmaceutical manufacturing plant

Abstract

Pharmaceutical plants are usually characterized by workplaces with quality levels generally higher than in other manufactoring sectors since healthcare products need to be produced in special conditions, keeping under a strong control hygiene, chemical and biological contaminants, and giving a particular emphasis on equipment maintenance. Limited physical work load, a low rate of injuries and work related pathologies together with a high level of quality process control contribute to consider pharma work conditions as generally light and safe. In this kind of contexts risk assessment cannot be based on factors individually considered, neither work load can be essentially measured on material handling and physical effort. Risk assessment and work environment improvements, on the contrary, have to be studied by an integrated view point. The paper presents methodologies and results of the applied research project IntegrARE (INTEGRated Assessment of Risks within Ergonomics) aimed at analyzing, in a big solid forms pharmaceutical plant, three different risk categories -architectural, ergonomic and active pharmaceutical ingredients risks -in order to highlight possible interactions on workers health, safety and wellbeing. After a detailed risk situations survey, singularly analyzed by a number of ad-hoc procedures, the study presents a methodology for integrated assessment of risks, aimed at identifying and evaluating integrated effects increasing or triggering risk situations for workers.

Analyzing occupational risks of pharmaceutical industry under uncertainty using a Bow-Tie analysis

“…This study also was incapable to capture model uncertainty owing to the individual difference among the input events in FTA or ETA. There is limited research in the literature related to workers health and safety assessment in pharmaceutical industry [1,5,[45][46][47][48][49]] since the quality risk management is commonly studied in this industry. As it is evident in the previous studies in the literature, this paper is the first QRA study performing Fuzzy Bow-Tie for pharmaceutical industry to analyze and visualize risks, causes and consequences of potential risk events and their impacts with possible preventive and protective control measures or barriers in prospective manner.…”

“…Thus, a single fuzzy probability has been obtained as ̌( ) = ( − 1 , , + 2 ) that best fits all DMs' forecasts. The values of , 1 2 are estimated in such a way that ̌ has minimum variance with all ̌( )′ . The square of deviations (S) can be computed as follows :…”

“…Pharmaceutical industry is usually considered to have high quality levels since healthcare products require manufacturing processes in safe conditions, protection under a substantial control hygiene against chemical and biological contaminants, and keeping equipments at optimum working conditions [1]. Since the main aim is to produce medical substances with pharmacological processes, many factors in pharmaceutical Research and Development (R&D) and manufacturing are hazardous for employees.…”