A study of pragmatic hazard-informed triage workflow intervention for occupational hygiene risk governance: Routine...

Occupational hygiene practices often treat compliance with occupational exposure limits (OEL) as an operational endpoint. However, OEL-compliant processes can still harbor preventable risks when hazard lists are incomplete or processes are upset.

We evaluated a novel, pragmatic governance intervention workflow that repurposes routine gas chromatography-flame ionization detection (GC-FID) chromatograms as 'exposure-intelligence' early-warning signals that can trigger prioritized confirmation and preventive action. Decisions are thus reordered from 'assume hazards then quantify targets' toward 'detect anomalous fingerprints, triage by hazard priority, confirm selectively, act, and remonitor.' With explicit handling of unknowns via a precautionary principle that assigns highest hazard potential and maximum uncertainty by default. The workflow comprises Tier-1 screening, Tier-2 hazard-informed triage and confirmation screening, and Tier-3 confirmation and action. Accordingly, we applied standardized GC-FID analysis to thermal desorption and solvent desorption samples from across automotive, electronics, and pharmaceutical manufacturing, which we converted into retention-time-aligned fingerprints. Anomalies were flagged against site-by-task baselines (robust statistics) and prioritized by signal magnitude, recurrence, candidate hazard band, and quality control (QC) uncertainty, triggering targeted gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS) confirmation and action logging.

From 45,765 chromatograms (237 sites and 37 tasks), screening flagged anomalies in 16.4% (2.3% false alarms, primarily QC/background artifacts). Targeted confirmation averaged 57 GCMS- analyses per month. Implementation was associated with shorter time-to-action (median 28 to 11 days; Cox hazard ratio, 2.4), higher confirmation positive predictive value for actionable high-concern leads (47%vs 23%), and reduced unexplained peak burden after controls (median -22% peaks/windows; -17% unexplained area fraction).

Routine GC-FID fingerprints can therefore operationalize scalable early warnings and risk-prioritized confirmation, complementing OEL-based compliance with faster, auditable preventive governance.