With the start of the year on us, I thought I would return to my favourite subject: exposure monitoring. Specifically, how we can understand it better, and get better value out of the effort we put into it. In this article I’m going to discuss strategies for exposure monitoring, and provide some tips that will – hopefully – make it easier.

Exposure monitoring was one of the areas that was dramatically changed by the Asbestos Network’s guidance on the subject, released over a year ago now. Let’s remind ourselves of what it said.

There are four different types of personal sampling that you can deploy:

1. Four-hour Control Limit
2. Specific Short-Duration Activity (SSDA)
3. 10-minute Short-Term Exposure Limit (STEL)
4. Assessment of suitability of Respiratory Protective Equipment (RPE)

But rather than just picking at random, you should be considering what your goal is: what are you trying to capture? The goals for all monitoring are derived from the regulatory requirements. These state that you must:

• Check employees’ exposure is below the Control Limit, and reduced to as low as is reasonably practicable (Reg 11)
• Confirm the controls including RPE are sufficient (Reg 11)
• Support current and future risk assessments (Reg 6)
• Establish employee exposure records (Reg 19)

Helpfully the guidance states that one or more requirements can often be met from a single sampling exercise – i.e. you can use one test to cover off several goals.

One simple trick

So, here’s the first tip – when requesting personal monitoring, try to ensure that the test parameters do not disqualify it from one of the other categories.

The tightest rules are around four-hour Control Limit testing (the 4-Hr TWA). This requires a minimum of 240 litres of air, and a flow rate of between one and two litres per minute. Therefore a two-hour test at two litres per minute qualifies, even though it is not actually four hours long.

The key question is: ‘Do you know what was happening outside of this test?’ Was there no activity (for example, a lunch break), or more of the same (for example, you tested for two hours, but the work lasted for four)? Either way, we are allowed to make assumptions.

This simple trick will allow you to use that single result for the first, second and fourth test type, and all the goals outlined above. In fact the only scenario it doesn’t cover is a method where short-term exposure might be very high, even if when measured over a full shift it will be more moderate. For these less common situations you will have to resort to a short air test.

The maths remains a little tricky for completing the 4hr TWA calculations – but not for Assure360 users. We analyse the data you put in, compare it to the rules, and provide all the four-hour Control Limit results for you.

Using a risk-based strategy

Now it starts to get a little trickier. The age old ‘rule’ where you test 40% of all asbestos insulating board (AIB) jobs, 60% of all pipe insulation work, and 100% of sprayed insulation jobs is out, replaced by a risk-based strategy.

You might say that the old way was broadly risk-based – AIB is, after all, less risky than sprayed insulation. True, but now we need to go much much further.

While AIB may generally present less of a risk, there are wide variations within AIB jobs. Nailed AIB is riskier than screwed, for example, as the chance of breakage is much greater. Further, it’s more challenging to remove nailed AIB from a crawl way than when your operatives are standing firmly on the floor. In recognition of these variations, the guidance now says we need to treat all of these (and more) differently, and have a strategy to measure each.

The bad news is that this is very challenging if you’re having to record and calculate everything in Excel – it’s possible, but it takes skill and time. However, the great news is that it’s easily achievable if you’re an Assure360 user.

In the admin-free Assure360 approach, the supervisor records all exposure information in the right way, first time round. We know how many times Tom, Dick or Harry has been exposed to the removal of nailed AIB in a duct, or screwed AIB in a bathroom, or anything else. We also know exactly how many times a personal test has been recorded against that activity. It’s therefore a matter of moments to do the calculation, giving you a live assessment of current performance against your strategy.

Cover all activities

Back to the guidance, which states that all activities should ultimately be covered. That’s not just the situations we’ve covered above, it’s also waste runs, enclosure construction and deconstruction, visual inspections, fine cleaning, and everything else. These all need their own strategy that you must measure.

The Health and Safety Executive (HSE) recognises that this is a big departure from what we were doing before. The regulator has indicated that you should focus on asbestos removal activities first and get good data, before broadening out to all the other lower-risk activities.

Which leaves new activities – or as the HSE puts it, ‘novel removal techniques’. These are new-to-you methods where you don’t have much or any data. Again, these need special attention. More protective RPE should be selected, and then you need to test, test, test.

Again, this is very simple when you approach the exercise activity by activity. And Assure360 makes it even easier – our users have access to unique benchmarking data, where you get to see the results of nearly 20,000 personals. Even the brand-new GelCut technique for wrap and cut features in our data, with an average exposure of 0.03 fibres per millilitre.

The final element of your strategy is that it should take account of people, because people have the biggest impact on your carefully designed methods. An inexperienced operative – whether they are directly employed or a short-term worker (STW) – should be viewed with suspicion. I jest, sort of, but the point is that everyone new to you – or inexperienced with your procedures – must be targeted with additional personal monitoring.

With Excel this would involve an employee log, some with flags against their name, so you can drag in a ‘number of personals’ figure from other spreadsheets. But as you might imagine, Assure360 makes this easy. All new employees (including STWs) are automatically tagged as needing increased supervision. This (again automatically) plays out with the strategy reports, measuring your performance with up to the minute, live data from your sites.

Simple – like all the best solutions should be.

Don’t miss out on a system that simplifies personals and so much more. Get in touch now to arrange your free demo!

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