A prescriptive risk framework for individual health and safety decisions.

Area of Science:

• Health Risk Assessment
• Decision Analysis
• Quantitative Psychology

Background:

• Existing individual risk assessment methods lack a unified approach.
• Comparing disparate health and safety risks (e.g., chronic vs. acute) is challenging.
• Quantifying subjective well-being alongside physical health is crucial for comprehensive risk evaluation.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop a conceptual framework for the prescriptive evaluation of individual health and safety risks.
• To enable the comparison of diverse risks, including accidents vs. illness and physical vs. psychological impacts.
• To provide a unified structure from which existing risk measures can be derived.

Main Methods:

• Developing a framework that incorporates value judgments for quantifying health states.
• Utilizing probabilities to link activities and conditions to defined health states.
• Operationalizing the framework for practical evaluation and comparison of risks.

Main Results:

• A novel conceptual framework for prescriptive health and safety risk evaluation is proposed.
• The framework allows for the comparison of chronic versus acute risks, accidents versus illness, and physical versus psychological impacts.
• Existing individual risk measures are shown to be special cases of this comprehensive framework.

Conclusions:

• The proposed framework offers a unified and comprehensive approach to individual health and safety risk assessment.
• It facilitates the comparison of diverse risks by integrating physical, psychological, and probabilistic factors.
• This conceptual model provides a foundation for developing more robust and standardized risk evaluation tools.