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Workshop Discussions
Approach (the assumptions,
the paradigm):
- 1. There are Effective Actions
that can be taken by a variety of people in a variety of situations
that, collectively, will lead to the reduction of the burden of harmful
occupational and environmental exposures of skin to chemicals.
2. These opportunities to take action typically require the completion
of several steps in order to be most effective.
3. Each step typically requires the collection of factual information
(data) and the processing of that information to create outputs, which
may be decisions and/or data summaries.
4. Most individuals benefit from guidance on how to collect the needed
data (data-gathering protocols) and on how to process those data to
make decisions (decision-making procedures).
5. Occupational and environmental health professionals will generally
be able to make effective use of more technically detailed data and
guidance than members of the general population.
6. It is a worthwhile product of this conference to prepare lists of
citations to credible information (databases, protocols, decision-making
procedures) without necessarily choosing the “best” sources in order
to aid those who are in a position to take effective actions in obtaining
information that they can assess for its usefulness in their specific
situations.
7. Many Opportunities for Effective Action use similar data and require
similar data-gathering protocols and decision-making procedures.
8. In almost all cases, data will be incomplete or somewhat ambiguous.
Also, there will almost always be a need to improve data-gathering protocols
and decision-making procedures. These may be identified as high-priority
areas for research.
9. The typical risk assessment and risk management paradigm generally
applies in which risk assessment requires hazard identification and
exposure characterization information to be combined to make a risk
assessment decision about whether exposures need to be reduced.If the
decision is affirmative, risk management will have elements of education
about the skin and options for controlling exposures. This will be played
out differently but with many common elements across all Opportunities
for Effective Action.
10. One output of the Workshop will be suggesting the relative importance
of:
(1) doing a better job of applying existing data using existing
decision-making procedures,
(2) obtaining new data using accepted data-gathering protocols,
(3) developing better data-gathering protocols and
(4) developing better decision-making procedures in order to improve
the outputs from each step of an Opportunity for Effective Action
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