Reference no: EM132313883 , Length: word count : 1500

Assessment – Environmental risk assessment tool

Overview

Assessment for this unit involves an environmental risk assessment tool, to be used at a community level by a local health authority. This tool comprises a template in the format of a blank form. Local health authorities should be able to use your template to perform a risk assessment of the social and environment factors present in their local community, in order to guide public health action. A local community consists of a suburb/town/Local Government Area. The accompanying document will explain the rationale behind the elements you have included in your tool, and suggested public health action

Guidelines

1. Choose one topic for your outbreak response plan. This topic should be different from the topic you chose for assessment 1 and 2.

a. Ross River Virus

b. Community-associated methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus

c. Cryptosporidiosis

2. Use the resources from week 9 to source some examples of a risk assessment tools, to guide your work

3. Use the disease transmission template you developed in week 3 as a starting point in considering factors that are either protective (e.g. high vaccination rates) or harmful (e.g. strong likelihood of extreme weather events), in the context of your disease. You will likely need to supplement this with further research.

4. Use the materials from topics 6 – 9 as a focal point in considering what properties of a local community need to be considered in your tool. Remember a ‘local community’ in this context isn’t a whole country or even a whole state, so the questions can be quite targeted.

5. Consider: social and environmental determinants, vulnerable subpopulations, the influence of culture and behaviour, and potential impacts of globalisation

6. Develop a tool in the form of a blank template. Public Health Authorities from a local community should be able to use your tool to perform a risk assessment, and highlight areas where public health programs and resources should be targeted or strengthened

7. As you are developing your tool, start to produce an accompanying document that explains why you have included each section and accompanying elements within your tool, with appropriate reference to evidence

8. There should be clear rationale outlining why you have included each element in your assessment

9. This rationale should be supplemented with a short (one paragraph max) reflection of an example of a public health project or program that may be considered to address this determinant. These do not need to be costed planned out in great detail.

An Introduction to Risk Assessment

Introduction

The purpose of a risk assessment is to systematically identify all of the risks associated with a task, activity or process, and put appropriate controls in place to eliminate or reduce the risks associated with that activity.

This entails breaking the activity down into separate components and ascertaining all of the risks associated with each component of the activity. Once the risks are identified you then assess the level of risk, to determine its priority.

According to the level of risk and hence the priority, you decide on what controls you can put in place to eliminate or reduce the risk. Obviously something with a high level of risk is a greater priority and may need to have more complex controls in place. In many circumstances you will find that it is impossible to totally eliminate the risk.

The degree of risk that remains after you have implemented controls is referred to as residual risk. If you find that the residual risks are too high (ie you just can’t put controls in place that reduce the risk), you may have to abandon the activity or think of other controls to put in place to reduce the risk. Best results will be achieved if the risk assessment is undertaken by more than one person, as this enables different views and perspectives, meaning that you are better able to identify all of the risks. It also means greater and more varied input  on determining controls.

Steps

1. Define the scope This means setting the boundaries of what you are going to look at part of this exercise. This has been done for us with our assessment guidelines – we have been told we are doing a community-level assessment of risks for a particular disease, focusing on transmission and the social and environmental determinants of communicable disease.

2. Identify the risks We should have already spent some time thinking about what will and won’t be included as a risk, based on disease transmission principles and the tools we have available to us to prevent disease transmission. For example, if we are looking at a disease for which there is no vaccine – we won’t be assessing immunisation rates! We will give our assessor a list of pre-defined risks that we have identified.

3. Assess the risks When all the risks have been identified we then need to ascertain the risk rating associated with each one. To do this, you have to determine the potential consequence of the risk, if it were to occur, and the potential likelihood of this happening. We will provide a consequences table and likelihood table, so the assessor can combine the data into a risk assessment matrix.

Communicable disease risk assessment: protocol for humanitarian emergencies

Risk-based approach to infectious disease safety.

Attachment:- Risk Assessment.rar