Representation of occupational hygiene data by way of a Geospatial Information System: influence on occupational hygiene knowledge

Abstract

Occupational Hygiene is an international professional discipline that is involved in the anticipation, recognition, evaluation and control of conditions (stressors) in the workplace that could cause occupational related illness and disease. In the process risk assessments, technical reports, sampling results and management plans are generated. These documents may be found in various formats e.g. electronic versions and hard copies and may be geographically dispersed within a company. In order to manage the stressors e.g. chemical, physical, biological and ergonomic the gathered data need to be transformed into information. Retrieval and cross correlation of information could be optimized if the information was consolidated in one site and format. Geographical Information Systems (GIS) has the ability to capture, consolidate, integrate, interrogate and display large volumes of data. In this research project, the ability of GIS to add value to management data within the paradigm of the knowledge cycle was investigated in terms of an increase of knowledge. Apart from previous work by the author that was done on noise management, no evidence could be found of similar studies combining occupational hygiene, GIS and the knowledge cycle and it appears as if this is the first study of its kind. The process involved a design science approach in the design of a model that could accommodate the Occupational Hygiene (OH) data. The model consisted of a generic framework that was structured in layers to accommodate the spatial data of the various stressors. In addition, a layer was created to deal with nonspatial management data. The model was applied to three industrial plants of two international companies on two continents, after which the opinions of staff members of the individual plants were gathered by way of semi-structured interviews. It was found that GIS could successfully capture OH data and provided an improved level of information to manage and present OH related data. Value was added in that new perspectives of existing data were created by superimposing the various layers. Despite the differences in products and the geographic distribution, the results of the evaluative feedback interviews proved to be almost identical for all three industrial plants. The results supported an increase of knowledge as interpreted within the paradigm of the elements and subelements of the knowledge cycle. In addition to this, a strong spike in the ability of GIS to integrate knowledge and present it in an understandable visual format was reported.