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Management of occupational health and safety (OHS) plays a critical role in building safe and effective working environments, especially in industries defined by dangerous operations like manufacturing. Secondary industries are characterized by their use of dangerous materials, complex machinery, and repetitive manual work, prompting the need for stringent OHS laws to protect employees and support business sustainability. Although extensive regulatory materials like ISO 45001 and EU Directive 89/391/EEC exist, the implementation of OHS standards varies among organizations significantly. While larger organizations adopt structured frameworks of safety management, small and medium enterprises (SMEs) are often confronted by economic and technical constraints. As a result, policies only appear on paper, and their attitude toward occupational safety is passive. Employing a structured survey analysis, this study evaluates the level at which manufacturing companies in Macedonia-Thrace, a region in Northern Greece, implement OHS actions, the barriers that face them, and how OHS programs influence business performance. Based on the findings, companies that apply proactive OHS practices achieve more productivity, increased staff retention, and lower costs due to accidents, while SMEs often find it difficult to undertake comprehensive policies. The research further identifies the impact of electronic technology, regulation, and leadership on enhancing OHS performance. This study provides evidence-based recommendations on policy changes through the exploration of regionalized patterns of adoption of OHS practices by industrial companies and key policy intervention areas. By eliminating underlying structural loopholes in the implementation of OHS, this paper provides research-backed policy solutions aimed at enhancing work safety and improving corporate performance in the secondary industry. The reinforcement of OHS measures not only reduces hazards at the workplace but also improves the resilience of business, its competitiveness, and conformity to regulations.

Objective The ability of occupational health and safety (OHS) legislation and regulatory enforcement to prevent workplace injuries and illnesses is contingent on political, economic, and organizational conditions. This systematic review of qualitative research articles considers how OHS legislation and regulatory enforcement are planned and implemented. Methods A comprehensive search of peer-reviewed, English-language articles published between 1990 and 2013 yielded 11 947 articles. We identified 34 qualitative articles as relevant, 18 of which passed our quality assessment and proceeded to meta-ethnographic synthesis. Results The synthesis yielded four main themes: OHS regulation formation, regulation challenges, inspector organization, and worker representation in OHS. It illuminates how OHS legislation can be based on normative suppositions about worker and employer behavior and shaped by economic and political resources of parties. It also shows how implementation of OHS legislation is affected by \"general duty\" law, agency coordination, resourcing of inspectorates, and ability of workers to participate in the system. Conclusions The review identifies methodological gaps and promising areas for further research in \"grey\" zones of legislation implementation.

The widespread adoption of remote and hybrid work due to COVID-19 calls for studies that explore the ramifications of these scenarios for office workers from an occupational health and wellbeing perspective. This paper aims to identify the needs and challenges in remote and hybrid work and the potential for a sustainable future work environment. Data collection involved two qualitative studies with a total of 53 participants, who represented employees, staff managers, and service/facility providers at three Swedish public service organisations (primarily healthcare and infrastructure administration). The results describe opportunities and challenges with the adoption of remote and hybrid work from individual, group, and leadership perspectives. The main benefits of remote work were increased flexibility, autonomy, work-life balance and individual performance, while major challenges were social aspects such as lost comradery and isolation. Hybrid work was perceived to provide the best of both worlds of remote and office work, given that employees and managers develop new skills and competencies to adjust to new ways of working. To achieve the expected individual and organisational benefits of hybrid work, employers are expected to provide support and flexibility and re-design the physical and digital workplaces to fit the new and diverse needs of employees.

Obesity hypoventilation syndrome (OHS) is a comorbidity in patients with Obstructive sleep apnea (OSA). It has a significant impact on the treatment and outcomes. There is paucity of data on the prevalence of OHS and its associated factors. Our objective was to estimate this for our Indian cohort. This is a retrospective study on consecutive patients who underwent a sleep study for suspicion of OSA from January 2022 to December 2022. Details of these patients were extracted from the electronic medical records, and the sleep studies were analysed. The prevalence of OHS was calculated. Multiple logistic regression analysis was performed to ascertain the independent OHS predictors. In an Indian patient population comprising predominantly southern and eastern Indian residents, 674 who met the specified criteria were included. Their mean age was 51.7 (SD 12.5), 426 (63.2%) were males, and 51.3% were obese. The prevalence of OHS was 5.8%. Only two patients without OSA had OHS. For the BMI ranges 30–40, 40–50, and > 50 kg/m 2 , the prevalence of OHS was 9%, 13%, and 20%, respectively. Multivariate logistic regression analysis found that female gender (OR = 4.1), BMI ≥ 35 kg/m 2 (OR = 3.2), and orthopnoea (OR = 4.8) were independently associated with OHS. Hypothyroidism (OR = 2.2) showed a significant association only in the univariate analysis. In a cohort of Indian patients referred for a sleep study, the prevalence of OHS is low. Increased BMI, female gender and a history of orthopnea were independent predictors of OHS.

Objectives Training is regarded as an important component of occupational health and safety (OHS) programs. This paper primarily addresses whether OHS training has a beneficial effect on workers. The paper also examines whether higher engagement OHS training has a greater effect than lower engagement training. Methods Ten bibliographic databases were searched for pre-post randomized trial studies published in journals between 1996 and November 2007. Training interventions were included if they were delivered to workers and were concerned with primary prevention of occupational illness or injury. The methodological quality of each relevant study was assessed and data was extracted. The impacts of OHS training in each study were summarized by calculating the standardized mean differences. The strength of the evidence on training's effectiveness was assessed for (i) knowledge, (ii) attitudes and beliefs, (iii) behaviors, and (iv) health using the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Guide to Community Preventive Services, a qualitative evidence synthesis method. Results Twenty-two studies met the relevance criteria of the review. They involved a variety of study populations, occupational hazards, and types of training. Strong evidence was found for the effectiveness of training on worker OHS behaviors, but insufficient evidence was found of its effectiveness on health (ie, symptoms, injuries, illnesses). Conclusions The review team recommends that workplaces continue to deliver OHS training to employees because training positively affects worker practices. However, large impacts of training on health cannot be expected based on research evidence.

Information and communication technologies (ICTs) have contributed to advances in Occupational Health and Safety, improving the security of workers. The use of Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) based on ICTs reduces the risk of accidents in the workplace, thanks to the capacity of the equipment to make decisions on the basis of environmental factors. Paradigms such as the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) make it possible to generate PPE models feasibly and create devices with more advanced characteristics such as monitoring, sensing the environment and risk detection between others. The working environment is monitored continuously by these models and they notify the employees and their supervisors of any anomalies and threats. This paper presents a smart helmet prototype that monitors the conditions in the workers’ environment and performs a near real-time evaluation of risks. The data collected by sensors is sent to an AI-driven platform for analysis. The training dataset consisted of 11,755 samples and 12 different scenarios. As part of this research, a comparative study of the state-of-the-art models of supervised learning is carried out. Moreover, the use of a Deep Convolutional Neural Network (ConvNet/CNN) is proposed for the detection of possible occupational risks. The data are processed to make them suitable for the CNN and the results are compared against a Static Neural Network (NN), Naive Bayes Classifier (NB) and Support Vector Machine (SVM), where the CNN had an accuracy of 92.05% in cross-validation.

This study used the 2-phenyl-4,4,5,5-tetramethylimidazoline-1-oxyl 3-oxide radical (PTIO•) trapping model to study the antioxidant activities of 16 natural xanthones in aqueous solution, including garcinone C, γ-mangostin, subelliptenone G, mangiferin, 1,6,7-trihydroxy-xanthone, 1,2,5-trihydroxyxanthone, 1,5,6-trihydroxyxanthone, norathyriol, 1,3,5,6-tetrahydroxy-xanthone, isojacareubin, 1,3,5,8-tetrahydroxyxanthone, isomangiferin, 2-hydroxyxanthone, 7-O-methylmangiferin, neomangiferin, and lancerin. It was observed that most of the 16 xanthones could scavenge the PTIO• radical in a dose-dependent manner at pH 4.5 and 7.4. Among them, 12 xanthones of the para-di-OHs (or ortho-di-OHs) type always exhibited lower half maximal inhibitory concentration (IC50) values than those not of the para-di-OHs (or ortho-di-OHs) type. Ultra-performance liquid chromatography coupled with electrospray ionization quadrupole time-of-flight tandem mass spectrometry (UPLC-ESI-Q-TOF-MS/MS) analysis revealed that most of these xanthones gave xanthone-xanthone dimers after incubation with PTIO•, except for neomangiferin. Based on these data, we concluded that the antioxidant activity of phenolic xanthone may be mediated by electron-transfer (ET) plus H+-transfer mechanisms. Through these mechanisms, some xanthones can further dimerize unless they bear huge substituents with steric hindrance. Four substituent types (i.e., para-di-OHs, 5,6-di-OHs, 6,7-di-OHs, and 7,8-di-OHs) dominate the antioxidant activity of phenolic xanthones, while other substituents (including isoprenyl and 3-hydroxy-3-methylbutyl substituents) play a minor role as long as they do not break the above four types.

Many previous studies have reported that the occupational health and safety (OHS) enforcement is poor in developing countries. However these studies have mainly focused on the broader enforcement problems and not fully considered the challenges confronting the institutions responsible for enforcing OHS standards at workplaces. In this study, twelve potential challenges were identified from an extensive literature review, then an empirical investigation was carried out via a questionnaire survey from OHS inspectors and professionals in the Ghanaian construction industry. The twelve challenges were confirmed and ranked. Also, analysis of variance (ANOVA) and correlation were used to determine the statistical significance of the responses and the relationships between the challenges. Based on these findings, this study provides practical strategies for government, OHS inspectors and other professionals within the construction industry to improve the OHS enforcement. The research findings can also be adopted as a basis to assess challenges confronting OHS institutions in other developing countries.

Information and communication technology has evolved dramatically, and now the majority of people are using internet and sharing their opinion more openly, which has led to the creation, collection and circulation of hate speech over multiple platforms. The anonymity and movability given by these social media platforms allow people to hide themselves behind a screen and spread the hate effortlessly. Online hate speech (OHS) recognition can play a vital role in stopping such activities and can thus restore the position of public platforms as the open marketplace of ideas. To study hate speech detection in social media, we surveyed the related available datasets on the web-based platform. We further analyzed approximately 200 research papers indexed in the different journals from 2010 to 2022. The papers were divided into various sections and approaches used in OHS detection, i.e., feature selection, traditional machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL). Based on the selected 111 papers, we found that 44 articles used traditional ML and 35 used DL-based approaches. We concluded that most authors used SVM, Naive Bayes, Decision Tree in ML and CNN, LSTM in the DL approach. This survey contributes by providing a systematic approach to help researchers identify a new research direction in online hate speech.

This study endeavors to prioritize occupational health and safety (OHS) accomplishments across ten forest management directorates in a specified province of Turkey, utilizing multi-criteria decision-making techniques (MCDMT). In a rigorous evaluation across four applied methodologies, the alternative P5 (amount of risk before measures) consistently exhibited superior performance. A notable emphasis of this research lies in the employment of a sophisticated OHS performance model, developed herein, to critically assess the OHS performance within these forest management directorates. In our evaluations, static variables such as land use and land cover, slope, vegetation type, soil characteristics, and distance from highways and human settlements were considered. Similarly, dynamic variables including temperature, wind speed and direction, and humidity were also factored in. Our findings corroborate the substantial ramifications, both tangible and intangible, of workplace accidents, hence underscoring the imperativeness of extensive, inter-industrial research initiatives geared towards effective accident prevention. This research is particularly focused on fortifying accident prevention measures in the arena of occupational health and safety during forest fires—an area with substantial economic and social implications, and of escalating importance in light of the expanding prominence of clean energy sources. Specifics pertaining to the forest fire rate within the studied directorates, as well as the criteria bearing the most and least impact as determined by this study, will be explicated in the full text, accompanied by their corresponding percentage values. Through the employment of Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP), Fuzzy Analytical Hierarchy Process (F-AHP), and the Preference Ranking Organization Method for Enrichment Evaluations (PROMETHEE) method, this study demonstrates the efficacy of MCDMTs in assessing and categorizing OHS performance, hence contributing valuable insights to managers, OHS experts, and future research undertakings. In conclusion, this research concentrates on the formulation of employee-centric occupational health and safety systems, with a specific emphasis on forest fires. The proposed OHS performance index model represents a tool of exceptional potential in the evaluation of performance measurement, while addressing uncertainties across diverse sectors. This underscores the urgency of addressing health and sustainability issues within economic, social, and ecological domains through the rigorous examination and implementation of effective OHS practices.