Current legislation imposes to companies the risk assessment of workers arising from exposure to physical agents (AOR). This implies a significant attention to the sources and levels of optical radiation generated by them.
In industry sources that emit artificial optical radiation can be:
- Electric arc (electric welding);
- Oxyacetylene welding;
- Incandescent material such as metal or molten glass;
- Crucibles and furnaces;
- Radiant heater lamps;
- Every device that emits artificial optical radiation.
In clinical environment there are equipment that emit possible optical radiation useful to nurse patients but , the same equipment, can be dangerous to the workers that use them:
- surgical lights in operating room;
- germicidal lamps for sterilization and disinfection;
- lamps for light curing polymers for dentistry;
- phototherapy lamps.
In this case there are mainly ultraviolet radiation: UVA, UVB, UVC.
In particular:
- in some surgical lights, if the visual exposure of the source is direct, the exposure limit values for “blue light” can be overcome in 10 minutes;
- lamps used to sterilize workspaces, hospital local and laboratories can emit UVC.
Measurements and monitoring
After a brief with the security responsible to verify entities and dislocation of sources we proceed with measurements and monitoring (in order with existent technical regulations) following the directives given by the company.
Time of measurement depends from the sources characteristics, they must be long enough to a correct assessment of the risk related to them.
Subsequently it is prepared a Technical Report for the Risk Assessment in which it is described the values observed during the measurement campaign.
Our technical report describes methods and tools used, including instrument calibration documents, legal regulations with limit values, images describing the sources analysed, the values found during measurement campaigns and, in the event of exceeding the legal limits, information to reduce the detected risks.