1,720,977 research outputs found
A holistic view and evaluation of health and safety at work: Enabling the assessment of the overall burden
Full text linkThe social burden of unsafe and unhealthy workplaces is extremely high, with more than a billion victims of work-related illnesses per year, but a unified and comparable view of workers' unsafe and unhealthy loads is still missing. This paper proposes a holistic approach that enables the comparison of Health and Safety (H&S) matters by quantifying the expected damage through a unique consistent indicator (R), that is, the average number of potential lost days of a worker in a working configuration. Evaluating risks of working configurations and then defining the overall company risks, enables decision-makers to quantitatively assess the burden to make well-grounded decisions for far-sighted strategies enhancing H&S. This study proposes a four-step process that finally returns the overall risk level (R) in terms of number of lost days. These steps are structured in a way that can be implemented regardless of any contexts' features; their actual implementation, instead, will require a quantification that is assumed to be context - country at least - dependent because it will be grounded on potentially different available datasets. An example is provided in the paper, that fits the four-step process into the Italian context, by combining three types of risks - impact, cutting, and noise - under the same indicator (R). The approach has great potential for future applications in real working contexts. The four-step process has the potential to be used as a practical tool to assess the economic impact of the actual risk load over the years
The design of effective safety training courses and differences in practice: an Italian study
No full textAwareness does not arise from passive learning of rules and procedures, but from proper education to a culture of safety. Safe behaviors are driven by the motivation and knowledge of the workers, and the participation and involvement of workers ensure optimal performance. This work, with a reference to educational learning theories, investigates how to make workers' training more effective by studying the impact of educational factors on adult learning. New approaches have been developed in recent years with the active involvement of the participants.
A framework was built, starting from the literature, to connect different teaching methodologies and trainers' roles to educational factors. It identifies seven constructs for teaching methodologies, two for the trainer's role, and four for educational factors as drivers of effective training. A questionnaire was distributed to Italian trainers in companies offering safety training courses and the results confirmed the framework's structure. However, unlike the framework, role playing and group work teaching methodologies, which presume higher effectiveness of training, were not prevalent among trainers who preferred traditional methodologies like frontal lessons, participatory lessons, and personal experiences. These findings suggested a need for improvement in safety training activities. This study, developed before the spread of Covid-19, provides a starting point for further analyses to evaluate how things have changed over time and propose further improvements in the design of safety training activities
Indagine di biomonitoraggio mediante l’utilizzo di talli lichenici nell’area portuale del trapanese e raffronto dei risultati ottenuti prima e dopo un evento di carattere mondiale come l’AMERCA’CUP.
No full textSupply chain chronic losses and risk interdependencies: a Bayesian Belief Network approach
No full textSupply Chain Risk Management (SCRM) has become integral to firm governance, and risk interdependencies, despite limited attention, significantly impact risk analysis and mitigation. Recurrent risks, resulting from consistent disturbances, generate chronic losses and are critically affected by other related risks. This work enhances the assessment of chronic losses with interdependent risks, building upon an existing Bayesian Belief Network (BBN) approach for risk interdependencies in SCRM, combining expected utility theory to address the complex, interconnected nature of risks. This work advocates a change in existing approaches to properly evaluate chronic losses often underestimated due to decision makers' expectations. The research shows that the impact of recurrent risks may be underestimated by other approaches based on their frequency, undermining confidence in mitigation strategies. This work not only presents a novel approach to risk assessment but also highlights the importance of studying causal interdependencies, and emphasises the need to consider low-probability and high-impact risks but also recurrent, seemingly minor risks in SCRM processes
Occupational Safety and Health Education and Training: A Latent Dirichlet Allocation Systematic Literature Review
Full text linkEducation and training play an increasingly meaningful role in recent research on Occupational Safety and Health (OSH) through the whole companies’ supply chains. However, considering the extent of the subject, most research works focus on specific issues, which are not easily replicable in other contexts. Therefore, this work gathers the main results achieved by researchers and systematically identifies leading research paths and trends for future works. A review and systematic categorisation of the existent literature have deemed essential for achieving the scope. The Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) technique has been chosen to extract meaningful information on education and/or training and cluster articles, which have been grouped into eight topics. This analysis has brought out several key factors (industry hazards, workers’ motivation, availability of technologies, etc.) that influence the success or failure of implementing OSH education and training programs. This work pays particular attention to human factors which, if effectively managed, would induce a great step forward for OSH education and training. There is still little or no evidence of education and training’s effectiveness through time since monitoring the outcomes has been often neglected by the management. Nonetheless, Industry 4.0 technologies will help to fill this gap by enabling real-time and continuous tracking of outcomes, which will pave the way for several future works
Oral plus vaginal alpha-lipoic acid in women at risk for preterm delivery
Full text linkObjective: The etiology of preterm labor is multifactorial. An inflammatory response is always involved with the activation of NF-kB that determines synthesis and release of inflammatory molecules, implicated in fetal membrane activation, cervical modifications, abdominal pain and spontaneous uterine contractions. There is a close relationship between preterm birth and cervical shortening in the second quarter of pregnancy. We evaluated the benefits of alpha-lipoic acid administration on women considered at risk of preterm delivery due to the presence of symptoms (pelvic pain and uterine contractions) or reduced cervical length.
Patients and Methods: This prospective observational study was carried out at the Gynecology and Obstetrics Unit of Palermo University Hospital (Palermo, Italy), from October 2015 to April 2016. The inclusion criteria were: women aged 18-35, with gestational age between 24 and 33 weeks of amenorrhea, pregnancy at risk of preterm delivery due to cervical length between 35-25 mm (in presence of symptoms) or < 30 and > 15 mm (if asymptomatic), intact membranes and negative for vaginosis. Patients were treated daily with alpha lipoic acid orally (300 mg, twice a day for 30 days) and vaginally (10 mg, once a day for 10 days), or untreated (controls). Patients were evaluated at the baseline (T 0), after 7 days, after 30 days, and at 34 weeks of gestation considering: maternal characteristics, symptomology and cervical length.
Results: Among 60 analyzed women, 50 were treated orally and vaginally with alpha-lipoic acid, whereas 10 did not undergo any therapy. In the treated group, 10 patients were asymptomatic and 40 symptomatic. The symptoms disappeared in 37 patients. In the untreated group, 4 women were symptomatic and 6 asymptomatic. At the end all women were symptomatic. Mean cervical length showed a reduction in the untreated group compared to the treated group.
Conclusions: The vaginal/oral-combined administration with alpha-lipoic acid showed effectiveness in reducing symptoms and preventing cervical shortening in our set of patients. No adverse effects were detected during the treatment
Towards a robust impact evaluation of technological innovation interventions on occupational safety and health
No full textHealth and safety interventions implemented in the past often lacked detailed design and rigorous evaluation of their outcomes. Luckily, in recent years, there has been a gradual rethinking of intervention design and evaluation, leading to higher impactful measures in the field. Although much of the literature has focused on evaluating interventions – a crucial phase that not only monitors the success of a specific intervention but has also the potential to generate knowledge for future interventions to improve their design and implementation – most of it remains theoretical and not applied in reality. Therefore, this study aims to show the potential of introducing a national Occupational Safety and Health (OSH) initiative that assesses the multiple impacts of health and safety in the workplace through the evaluation of different interventions, which are not solely focused on OSH improvement, but also on promoting technological innovation through Industry 4.0 solutions. This initiative is part of a portfolio of research projects funded by the Italian National Institute for Insurance against Accidents at Work (INAIL, i.e., in Italian, ‘Istituto Nazionale Assicurazione Infortuni sul Lavoro’), which continuously subsidizes projects in different disciplines to improve workers’ well-being by increasing the global effectiveness of prevention activities. This study presents the initial stages of the initiative, including an analysis of the surrounding environment and the setting up of main variables according to a Programme Theory logic. The Programme Theory will enable the detection of the mechanisms that produce certain effects on the intervention's development. This perspective will help us understand how the success or failure of interventions is reached by studying the potential mechanisms – beneficial and detrimental – that affected the intervention's outcome
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
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