Occupational Risks Management as a Basis of Industrial Injuries and Occupational Disease Prevention

The Government of the Russian Federation sets the task to create a new Health, Safety and Environment Management System (HSEMS) based on the implementation of procedures described as occupational risks management. The functioning of the new HSEMS model will promote turning from the practice of reacting to the already occurred facts of injuries and occupational diseases into the mechanism of the development and performing the preventive measures against accidents, and maintaining the personnel health. However, the implementation of the risk management into the health and safety activities of enterprises is constrained by the methodological difficulties in identifying measurable or estimated parameters, which are required for implementation occupational safety management processes. The recommendations for establishment of qualitative characteristics of the occupational risks assessment, methods of their turning from verbal parameters into quantitative parameters, as well as in determining the boundaries between acceptable and unacceptable risks are presented. (paper)