Workplace Health and Safety Framework

Discuss about the Effects of Occupational Safety and Health Risks Affecting Workers in Confined Space (Manhole) Environment.

A confined place is characterized as a place which is by virtue enclosed in nature, it is quite likely that there would be foreseeable chances of risk and this includes places like any chamber, pit, tank, vat, tunnel, pipe, hatch, shaft or silo and sewer where such risk may arise. Workplace safety and health emphasizes over the legal certification and registration requirements as well as the surveillance and monitoring coupled with accident and workplace injury compensations (Frey and Osborne, 2017). All the organizations operating in the highly competitive marketplace are essentially required to understand the Workplace Safety and Health requirements appropriately so as to improve the safety of the workplace. As arousal of risk in the confined place is quite likely it is also necessary for the organizations whose employees work in these areas are essentially required to enact certain health and safety frameworks so as to provide the employees with the essential level of security (Frumkin, 2016). This research work will solely focus on determining the effect of this health and safety risks which may arise in the context of working in a confined place. In order to achieve the desired outcome the research work will primarily focus on developing a crisp idea about the health and safety framework at the workplace. Afterwards it will attempt to recognize the risk factors which are intricately related to the confined work environment. Furthermore, the impact of the workplace health and safety framework in mitigating the risk factors of confined workplace and thereby affecting the workers will be evaluated and analyzed.

The workplace health and safety is generally characterized as the philosophy of anticipating, evaluating, recognizing as well as hazards that may arise in or from the workplace which in turn could adversely affect the health of the workers (Mullen et al., 2017). This also takes into consideration the possible impacts on the environment as well as on the surrounding communities. This specific domain is vast and covers almost a huge number of workplace and environmental hazards. A wider range of skills, knowledge, structure and analytical capabilities are essentially required for the effective implementation of all the building blocks which ultimately develops the workplace health and safety framework. There are certain factors which have contributed towards the emergence of health and safety framework of workplace. The human, economic as well as social costs associated with the occupational accidents, diseases, injuries and the industrial disasters have long been persisted to be a major concern to the workplace of all the levels (Werner et al., 2015). The strategies and remedial measures are continuously being designed and implemented in order to eradicate, control, prevent or eliminate the workplace hazards and risks. This have been done with the expectation that this would help the organizations to sustain the continuously changing technological and economic environment (Wright and Carboneau, 2016). However, despite the growing concern about the workplace health and safety, the improvement may be slower because of which the workplace accidents and occupational hazards are becoming too much frequent and their cost in terms of human suffering as well as economic burden is continuing to be significant. A current ILO report suggested that on an average nearly 2 million occupational hazards take place around the world every year (Arbogast et al., 2016). The highest proportion of the deaths is mainly caused by the work related cancers and cardiovascular diseases as well as some of the communicable diseases. On an average the overall yearly rate of the occupational hazards both fatal as well as non-fatal is found to be 270 million (Holt and Allen, 2015). However, due to the implementation of the health and safety frameworks the industrialized countries are claiming that the rate of overall occupational accidents and disease is declining slowly. This statement has also been substantiated by World Health Organization through empirical evidences (Kjellstrom et al., 2016).

Emergence of Occupational Hazards

A confined space is characterized as any chamber, manhole, tank, silo, vat or pipe or any other enclosed space where, dangerous gaseous elements, fumes or vapors are liable to be present to such an extent that it can give rise to the risk of fire or explosion. The supply of oxygen in such places is likely to be inadequate for sustaining life and there may be a risk of engulfment through materials (Faris, 2017). There are a few characteristic features through which the confined place can be categorized and these are stated as follows,

• These places are not designed or intended to be occupied by the human beings.
• These places possesses restricted entrance or exit by the virtue of its location or means or size (Pearce and Rusczek, 2017)..
• Characteristically these places may contain materials which may in turn bury or trap people.
• Can pose significant risk before the health and safety of an individual who enters into these place because of one or more of the issues. Such as the design, location or atmosphere. The materials or the substances contained within those places and may be because of the work activities which are being carried out within that place (Topie et al., 2015).

It is necessary to mention that a “responsible person” in the context of the person who is entering into the confined space is the employer of that person or the expert personnel under whose direction that person is entering or working within the confined space (Biddison et al., 2016).

Presently the emergence of accidents in the confined space environment of work has been observed to be depicting an increasing trend. For instance it can be stated that the Yellow & While Pte Ltd was held accused on court and was fined $19000 for conducting work in a confine space without maintaining the compliance and due diligence of the safety framework. As a result of which two workers and supervisor died in the accident. On the other hand, James Contractor a company which was carrying out a cable work inside a manhole in Jurong East had not appointed an expert of confined space safety assessor as a result of which a supervisor died in the incident due to the lack of oxygen (Reese, 2015). As these accidents are increasing with the passage of time it is the high time to examine these areas and hence this considered as an important issue to conduct research upon. Furthermore, it is considered as an important issue at this point of time as the people as well as the organizations are becoming aware about the health and safety frameworks of the concerned countries they are becoming more inclined towards abiding by those frameworks (Babur et al., 2016). Hence, it can be expected that this research work would certainly benefit those organizations as well as the individuals to develop a broader understanding about the impact of the health and safety framework on the workers of confined space environment.

The broader aim of the research work is to evaluate the impact of workplace health and safety framework over the workers in a confined place.

Confined Space Characteristics

The objectives of the research can be summarized as follows,

• To develop a crystal clear idea about the workplace health and safety framework
• To develop a better understanding about the confined space
• To determine how and to what extent the workplace and safety framework affects the workers of confined environment
• To understand the potential risk factors associated with working in confined workplace.
• To develop a proper framework through which these risks could be mitigated.

The research questions which have been developed and designed in accordance with the research objectives can be stated and summarize as follows,

• What is workplace health and safety framework?
• What is confined space work environment?
• How and to what extent health and safety framework affects the workers of confined space environment?
• What are the potential risk factors associated with the confined space environment?
• How the risks associated with confined space work environment can be mitigated?

In order to achieve the desired outcome a research may adopt different research techniques. There are mainly two types of research techniques which are namely positivism and interpretivism (Taylor et al., 2015). However the present research work will be based on pragmatic research as this specific research approach helps to investigate every nooks and corner of the selected research issue. In other words the pragmatic research in turn takes into account a mixed research in order to derive the desired research outcome. The present research work is concerned about determining the effect of health and safety risk affecting the employees working in confined place environment. Primarily the two types of research approaches which are considered in this regard are positivism and interpretivism.

In one hand positivism helps to make use of the available data, graphs, charts which are available in relation to the topic. On the other hand, interpretivism takes into account the emotional responses of the participants of the study (Mackey and Gass, 2015). In this case the respondents will be the workers who are work in the confined environment and they will be asked a few question to evaluate how well they are informed about the confined place working rules and regulations specified by the health and safety framework of the concerned government of the country.

Inductive and deductive research methods are the two most important research approaches which can be taken into consideration while conducting a specific research work. The inductive research work is used in a particular research when the research gives rise to a completely new theory or concept. Under this approach the researcher may accrue relevant information and resort to the conceptual frameworks provided by the theorists previously (Lewis, 2015). However, in this case the research outcome should certainly be completely unique. In other words, under this approach the researcher can deduce the ideas or concepts from the existing theories but the outcome of the research should certainly be a completely new theory.

At the other end of the spectrum the deductive research approach is said to be used when the current research work makes use of the existing theories and models proposed by the previous researchers in order to achieve the desired research outcome (Lewis, 2015). In such a context the researcher may significantly make use of one or more theories but in this case the researcher is needed to mention the importance of all the theories in the research work.

Research Rationale

In the context of the present research work deductive approach will be used in order to usher the research towards completion. The theories and concepts which have been proposed by the previous researchers in this regard will be used in the current research work along with the response of the workers which would be collected in the form of primary data. This would lead the researcher to achieve the desired research outcome.

There are mainly three types of research designs which are categorized as the exploratory research, explanatory research and descriptive research.

When a particular research work do not possess a specific and properly designed hypothesis then that particular type of research is conducted on the basis of explanatory research (Flick, 2015). The person responsible for carries out the research as the data is retrieved and does not depend on any particular set of hypothesis.

Certain research works are conducted on the basis of the assumption that happenings around the world are governed by the rule of nature. These types of research works are known as the exploratory research. In the context of these research works it can be stated that the external factors are considered as the natural factors.

On the other end of the spectrum, there are certain research works which are based on secondary analysis and primary research in order to validate the research hypothesis and these are termed as the descriptive research design (Flick, 2015). The present research work will solely be based on the descriptive research design as it would conduct substantial secondary data analysis through reviewing the works of the previous researchers available in this regard. In addition to that it would also collect significant information as primary data from the workers of the confined place environment who are about the workplace health and safety framework. Thereby it would attempt to substantiate the research hypothesis.

The participants of the research work would be the workers of the confined place environment. It is a matter of fact that these workers may not always be ready for responding to the questions in an appropriate manner (Vaioleti, 2016). On the other hand, the workers may even be in a hurry and thereby may not answer to the questions appropriately which may yield a biased data set. Furthermore, it may also be the case that the workers are pressurized by their supervisors for providing appropriate feedbacks. On the other hand, the researcher has decided to survey only those workers who have attended the “WSQ work in confined space operation” which now have been made compulsory by the work health and safety framework. However, it is quite challenging and time consuming to identify the workers who have attended the program successfully. Collecting responses orom the workers is also a very time consuming process which may seem to be another major limitation of the research as the stipulated time frame of the research work does not allow longer time for data collection. Obtaining permission from the project site managers for collecting response from the workers will be another difficult process as the authorities are quite likely to be unwilling to permit the researcher to obtain feedbacks.

Aim and Objectives of the Research

The secondary data will be analyzed with the help of narrative analysis technique in the thematic analysis framework. On the basis of the secondary data obtained throughout the research work specific themes will be designed and on the basis of the themes relevant findings will be analyzed in alienation with the research objectives. The key reason behind using the thematic analysis is that it provides the researcher with the advantage of conducting the qualitative research as per his or her own convenience and thereby designing the themes which can in turn substantiate the research hypothesis.

The primary data will be analyses effectively with the help of descriptive statistical methods. The data collected from the participants will be presented in the form of graphs and charts which in turn will contribute towards developing a better understanding of the research issue. Furthermore it is necessary to mention that MS Excel or statistical packages like SPSS will be used to obtain and present research findings.

As opined by Smith (2015), proper ethics should certainly be maintained while conducting a research work. The primary and secondary data should be collected by following appropriate ethical guidelines. In the context of this research work it is ensured that the participants would not be forced to provide their feedbacks or to take part in the research work. On the other hand, the personal information which will be collected from the participants will be protected following the data protection act enacted by the government of Singapore. Furthermore, the secondary data would be collected from the trusted sources only, the researcher would enroll in the online libraries for obtaining access to all the online journals and articles. No case studies which are older than ten years would be considered in the research work as a valid material.

Reference List

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