Key Definitions in Workplace Safety and Processes
Process: A set of resources and activities that transform, adding value, inputs into outputs.
Sub-Process: A set of activities that can be disaggregated from a process and constitute a community that meets the definition of a process.
Risk: The combination of the probability and the result(s) of the occurrence of a hazardous event.
Safety: Conditions and factors affecting the physical integrity of employees, temporary workers, contractors, visitors, and any other person in the workplace.
Workplace: Performance area and development activities. Work formed by a physical space, tools, facilities, actual structure, equipment, and materials in general.
Intolerable Risk: Risk assessed. The magnitude of the risk under review is established or regarded as highly critical.
Routine task: Those executed habitually, meaning common situations that were made with a daily, weekly, or monthly frequency.
Non-routine task: A situation that is unusual, i.e., that is performed with a frequency of at least annually.
Accident: An unwanted event that results in cases resulting from injury, property damage, or other loss.
Incident: An event that gives rise to an accident or has the potential to produce it. A near-accident in which no injury, disease, damage, or other loss occurs is also called a near-miss. The term incident includes disruptive accidents, accidents with injury, property damage, near accidents, and operational failure.
Loss: Avoidable loss or injury of any resource.
Occupation: Title of the post that covers all work activities while a person develops that title.
Activity: Each of the stages developed in a process necessary to obtain the product or service.
Task: Each of the actions carried out for each activity of the process operating conditions, routine and non-routine.
Chemical Risk: All those risks that consist entirely of organic and inorganic agents, natural or synthetic, lacking life (powders, fibers, fumes, mists, gases, and vapors) able to interact with humans and that, under certain conditions, can damage the health of people through different routes of entry into the body (respiratory, digestive, skin, and eye).
Physical Hazard: All those forms of energy existing in the environment (noise, cold, ionizing and non-ionizing radiation, vibration, heat, and others) capable of interacting with humans and that, under certain conditions, can damage the health status of individuals.
Biohazard: All those living agents that can, under certain conditions, generate harm to human health (viruses, bacteria, parasites, fungi and their spores, etc.).
Ergonomic Risk: Set of elements given the physical and work environment, organizational and workload consisting of: physical elements (exertion, postures, rhythms, etc.), psychic elements (level of care, complexity, monotony, others), and psychosocial elements (salaries, personal development, relationships, shifts and schedules, communications, etc.), that can cause deterioration in people’s health.
Hazard: Source or situation with potential damage in terms of injury or illness, damage to property, damage to the environment, or a combination thereof.