Quantifying occupational risk: The development of an occupational risk model

Each year eighty-five people are killed on the job in the Netherlands and 167,000 are injured to the extent that they are at least a day absent from work. Their death and injuries occur during the approximately seven million person years that the Dutch workforce spend on their job. The ministry of Social Affairs and Employment (SZW) has as one of its main tasks to reduce and control occupational risk. Recently it commissioned a project to determine the risk and its causes following the same principles as used in quantified analyses of the third party risks of nuclear and chemical plants. To this end a model has been constructed: the occupational risk model (ORM). With this model authorities, industries and experts can evaluate the occupational risks for individual workers, for companies and for projects. The project has four major parts: assembly and analysis of accident and exposure data, generalisation of these data into a logical risk model, deriving improvement measures and their costs and developing an optimiser that supports cost effective risk reduction strategies. The model is a further development of previous work executed with support of SZW and the European Union, such as IRISK and AVRIM. This paper describes the concepts used in the model and the overall structure. Some of the results are also given. More detail and more results are given in other papers in this conference. (c) 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.