Occupational Risk

The occupational risk analysis encompasses different types of risk faced by employee’s in the workplace, such as physical, mechanical, chemical, biological and ergonomic. Depends on the type of industry and activities one type of hazard is more frequent than others. During the last decades, many procedures, laws and methods has been applied to reduce the health damage caused by such hazards. Even though, it’s still necessary a high effort to mitigate some of these hazards such as drowning, machinery, ergonomic, obesity and stress. In general terms, fishing, farming, and building are the activities related to the higher number of accidents or health damage. By the other way round, some industry such as Chemical, Oil & Gas and Nuclear are responsible for the worst accident in terms of consequence for employee’s health, environment and society. Therefore, the first step to avoid or mitigate these occupational hazards is to be aware about them in the workplace. Moreover, it’s necessary to implement a systematic occupational risk management with the best methods to mitigate and communicate such risk. This chapter aims to describe the occupational hazards in the workplace as well as the best methods to identify, classify, assess and mitigate such hazards.

Keywords: Occupational hazard, physical hazard, mechanical hazard, chemical hazard, biological hazards, ergonomic hazard, social and organizational factor.