Lesson 1: COSHH (Control of Substances Hazardous to Health) 2002
- COSHH is legislation to ensure harmful substances to health are adequately controlled in the workplace
- Substances hazardous to health are substances with the potential to cause harm if they are inhaled, ingested or there is dermal exposure
- Employers must ensure employees use control measures and employees are under duty to use them
- Under COSHH workplace exposure monitoring may be done
- Can find all Workplace Exposure Limits (WEL) in EH40
- Also discusses health surveillance and information, instruction and training
- Health records must be kept for 40 years
Regulations within COSHH
- Regulation 6: Risk Assessment
- Risk assessment should be done prior to work undertaken
- If employer has more than 5 employees he needs to record findings from risk assessment and record steps he has taken to meet requirements of regulation 7 (prevention and control)
- Information employers record should be proportionate to risk
- Regulation 7: Prevent or control exposure to hazard
- ALARP if COSHH schedule 1 or IARC category 1
- Regulation 8: Use of control measures
- Regulation 9: maintenance, examination, and testing of controls
- Periodic examination and test every 14 months of LEV and keep record for 5 years
- Regular weekly visual checks
- Regulation 10: Monitoring exposure at workplace
- If personnel monitoring required these records should be kept for atleast 40 years e.g. urine levels
- Regulation 11: Health surveillance
- Regulation 12: Information, instruction, and training
Biological agents
- Types of biological agents
- Micro-organisms e.g. bacteria, viruses, fungi
- Cell cultures if the cell being cultured is hazardous
- Parasites e.g. malaria (ticks and mosquitos are not biological agents but can be considered a route by which a pathogen can infect human)
- Work biological agent e.g. in vet or pharmaceutical
- Categorised into 4:
- Group 1: Unlikely to cause human illness
- Group 2: Can cause human disease
- Group 3: Can cause severe human disease
- Group 4: Causes severe disease and usually no effective treatment agents
Carcinogens are put into 3 categories
- Category 1: substances known to cause cancer on the basis of human experience
- Category 2: Substances which could cause answer on the basis of reliable animal evidence
- Category 3: substances where only evidence that cancer is present in animals and not relevant to human health (COSHH does not define category 3 as carcinogens
