As many employers know all too well, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (“OSHA”) requires them to record work-related injuries and illnesses and to maintain the OSHA 300 Log for five years. Moreover, OSHA requires all employers to report to OSHA certain serious injuries within a short time period. On September 11, 2014, OSHA announced its Final Rule revising the current recordkee...

This study examined the relationship between Washington's fall protection standard and injuries in construction workers. Workers' compensation claim rates for falls were examined for employers that were cited for violating the standard over the 1991-1992 period. Fall injury rates for the periods before and after inspections were compared. Claims for a control group of employers that had not bee...

Traditional safety-critical systems are designed and integrated by a systems integrator. The system integrator can asses the safety of the completed system before it is deployed. In medicine, there is a desire to transition from the traditional approach to a new model wherein a user can combine various devices post-hoc to create a new composite system that addresses a specific clinical scenario...

The management of occupational health and safety (OHS) including safety culture interventions is comprised of complex problems that are often hard to scope and define. Due to the dynamic nature and complexity of OHS management, the concept of system dynamics (SD) is used to analyze accident prevention. In this paper, a system dynamics group model building (GMB) approach is used to create a caus...

1Toxicology and Molecular Biology Branch, Health Effects Laboratory Division, National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH), Morgantown, WV 2Pathology and Physiology Research Branch, Health Effects Laboratory Division, National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH), Morgantown, WV 3Biostatistics and Epidemiology Branch, Health Effects Laboratory Division, National...

Exception handling is an important language feature for building more robust software programs. It is primarily concerned with capturing abnormal events, with the help of catch handlers for supporting recovery actions. In this paper, we advocate for a specification logic that can uniformly handle exceptions, program errors and other kinds of control flows. Our logic treats exceptions as possibl...

Using the results of psychophysical and biomechanical experiments, NIOSH (National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health) Recommended Weight Limit (RWL), the Lifting Index (LI), the form of the asymmetry multiplier, and the criterion for compression force were investigated. Analysis of the results indicated a significant difference between the NIOSH RWL and the reported Maximum Acceptabl...

To meet state and OSHA requirements for dealing with and reporting workplace violence, a growing number of hospitals, the author reports, are turning to baseline workplace violence assessments which survey employees in different roles, combined with a threat analysis and an analysis of existing controls and historical incidents that can be reviewed and tracked over time to show improvement or d...

Our critical computing systems are coded in low-level, typeunsafe languages such as C, and it is unlikely that they will be re-coded in a high-level, type-safe language such as Java. This invited talk discusses some approaches that show promise in achieving type safety for legacy