Abstract
Despite the promotion of measures to prevent occupational accidents based on risk assessment (hereinafter, ‘RA’) for machinery, implementation at small and medium-sized business remains insufficient. With the aim of supporting small businesses in performing RA, this study focused on hazard identification, which is considered the most important step in the RA process. To make it easier to consider the causal factors in possible occupational accidents related to machinery, the hazard list that has commonly been used as the starting point for hazard identification was reformulated with illustrations created based on our analysis of reported machinery accident cases. Specifically, the processes whereby each hazard led to an accident during the use of machinery in each reported case were presented as visualised information for the person(s) involved in hazard identification. A procedure was proposed for the simplified identification of hazards, using the illustrated hazard list, and a tablet PC app was developed based on this procedure. The results of an effectiveness evaluation conducted with the participation of three business sites indicate that the proposed hazard identification method was viewed favourably, although some points remain to be improved.
