Question

1. What are the four types of hazards commonly associated with the workplace?

2. What is the role of the occupational nurse?
3. What are the components of the epidemiologic triad?
4. What are the steps of a root cause analysis?

Answer 1

1. Occupational hazard is the dangers like illness or risk of injury experienced in the work place. The hazards are classifies as :

Physical hazards : that causes illness secondary to persistent exposure to loud noises, radiation,high temperature, cold, vibration,electricity,fire. Physical hazard like electrical injury causes burns and serious injuries.  

Ergonomic hazards : this is the physical factors that causes strain in the musculoskeletal system. It occurs as a result of poor body mechanics, poor lighting.

Chemical hazards: workers develops chronic illness when they exposed to harmful chemicals like carbon monoxide,fumes,vapors and other gases. Workers in chemical factory,hair dye companies, welding fumes,pharmaceutical companies are at a high risk of developing occupational asthma,cancer.

Biological hazards: Exposure to pathogenic organisms like bacteria,viruses,fungi that get transmitted from infected people,animals,insects. Some biological hazards like HIV,Hepatitis B,C, Malaria,Dengue,Needle stick injury. Biological hazard is common among health care professionals.Exposure to bacteria,moulds will results in respiratory diseases.

2. What is the role of the occupational nurse?

Occupational health nurse helps the workers from protecting from occupational health hazards. The prime duties of the occupational health nurse are framing health and safety programs, formulating disease prevention programs like smoking cessation, body mechanics, usage of personnel protective equipments. Maintaining health records and documenting all incident of occupational hazards, Rendering immediate care to treat illness, providing mental health program to reduce stress, periodical monitoring of health status of all workers and doing follow up, involved in research activities to evaluate hazards existing in the working environment.

3. Components of the epidemiologic triad :

Epidemiology defines as the science that deals with the study of incidence of disease occurs in different group of people. Epidemiological triad or triangle is the ways to understand the interaction of disease and the host.Epidemiological triad components are : Agent, Susceptible Host and the Environment.

Agent, host and environmental factors interaction will results in the disease. The agent refers to the infectious microorganisms or pathogenic organisms like bacteria, parasite, and microbes. The different agents are physical agents like exposure to excessive heat,cold humidity,radiation. Exposure to chemical agents endogenous and exogenous ,mechanical agents includes accidents,malnutrition includes protein malnutrition. Host refers to the susceptible humans who will get disease. Hosts gets sick when there is a alteration in physiological status. Environmental factors includes certain factors like temperature, water pollution,socioeconomic factors.