In this installment of EHSDA Shorts, Subena Colligan, CIH, CSP, Principal Coach, S. Colligan Coaching, explains the difference between safety and industrial hygiene.
This clip was taken from a webinar titled “Uncovering Hidden Hazards in Industrial Hygiene, which is available for free on-demand here.
Transcript (edited for clarity):
Subena Colligan: Sometimes I get asked this question. Because there’s such a world of safety, occupational health, occupational safety, but what’s the difference, especially when there are so many certified industrial hygienists who are also certified safety professionals or folks that are certified safety professionals or associate safety professionals that are working as industrial hygienists?
There are some key aspects that are different for each of them, so I thought I’d share them here with you today. I like to say as an example that a safety professional is very competent and coming in and saying, “Hey, it’s loud. We need to do something to control the exposures that people are having in this workplace.”
An industrial hygienist will come in and say, “Hey, it’s loud. This is what the long-term health effect is. Here are the different ways that we can engineer this.” We’re looking more at the health side of it. Also, “what chemicals are you using that could be inducing or making this noise exposure worse?” and then prescribing personal protective equipment.
And so our scopes typically look a little different where we’re talking about physical risks versus chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear, non-ionizing radiation ergonomics. And then we have some differences in our standards that we’re typically being taught in training, whether that’s through school or continuing education. Now we both do have OSHA standards as our primary base.
When you’re based here in the United States, many industrial hygienists tend to lean towards best practices that are initiated by a CGIH. CGIH is the American Conference of Governmental Industrial Hygienists. They publish what we call threshold limit values or TLVs. Those are basically a comparison to the permissible exposure limits that OSHA puts out.
We’re looking at a different global scale sometimes, but we both have the same ultimate outcome and that is to protect people. Industrial hygiene also adds protecting people in the environment to their resume, but we have the same objective.