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Nanomaterial safety in the workplace: pilot project for assessing the impact of the NIOSH Nanotechnology Research Center.



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  • Personal Author:
  • Description:
    In August 2014, the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) Nanotechnology Research Center (NTRC) asked the RAND Corporation to help develop and apply a method for assessing the center's contribution to improving the safety and health of workers who could be affected by the production, use, reuse, or disposal of the products of nanotechnology that are of greatest concern to workers, such as engineered nanomaterials. The purpose of the project was to develop a method that would help NTRC - and other NIOSH components - get beyond conventional bibliometric and patent analysis and closer to societal benefits or outcomes, in part by looking to the gray literature, professional events, and stakeholder outreach for supplemental evidence. In general, an organization's activities and outputs are relatively straightforward to measure and track. However, it tends to be more difficult to measure and track an organization's contributions beyond those activities and outputs, such as how it is contributing to its strategic goals or desired societal outcomes. For a research organization like NIOSH that relies heavily on intermediate parties to achieve its mission of worker safety and health, this can be especially difficult. Given this challenge, RAND researchers worked with NTRC leadership to develop a description of the center's operations, referred to as a logic model, that characterizes NTRC's activities and outputs and how they are used by NTRC's customers and other intermediate parties to contribute to improved worker safety and health. This report describes the method used to construct the NTRC logic model and includes insights and guidance for gathering and organizing information about NTRC's operations and their impact on or contributions to worker safety and health. RAND, in coordination with NTRC leadership, identified a portion of the organization to pilot this method and search for evidence of NTRC's activities and outputs that contribute to worker safety and health. For purposes of this pilot study, to test our model of the NTRC operations, we limited our data collection concerning NIOSH outputs and stakeholder engagement to information and organizations associated with nano-titanium dioxide (nano-TiO2) and nano-silver (nano-Ag); this also allows us to assess the method's potential application to future, fuller assessments. We identified a set of common categories of NTRC activities and outputs, as well as classes of stakeholders (spanning industrial, advocacy, governmental, research, educational, and training organizations) and workers, each of which makes use of NTRC's outputs in ways that have the potential to contribute to NIOSH's mission. Through a review of NIOSH documents, websites, and other publicly available information, we found examples of such use, suggesting that the proposed method can be used for the intended purpose. We also identified, with input from NTRC leadership, a small number of external customers and intermediate parties with whom to discuss NTRC's outputs and services and how they are being used to affect worker safety and health. These discussions were used to verify and expand our initial logic model and to collect examples of NTRC contributions to worker safety and health related to engineered nanomaterials. Discussions with those customers and intermediate parties improved our understanding of how they learn about and receive products and services from NIOSH. Overall, the individuals we spoke with acknowledged NIOSH's expertise in occupational safety and health, and they were aware of NIOSH publications and bulletins related to nanomaterials. Within the scope of our pilot assessment, interviewees also identified examples of how NTRC is contributing to nanomaterial worker safety and health - for example, through changes in workplace practices in direct response to NIOSH publications or through direct engagement with NTRC field research teams. The NTRC customers and intermediate parties we spoke with also mentioned sharing NIOSH information and best practices among peers, competitors, and customers. In addition, they discussed how NIOSH publications are integrated into other types of documents or products, such as occupational safety training materials, and disseminated among communities of interest. Our discussions also identified potential factors that might be inhibiting NIOSH's ability to achieve its desired outcomes. For instance, there is often not an explicit connection between the exposure to a particular nanomaterial, the health effect of that exposure, and the specific steps that should be taken in response to that exposure. In addition, the pace at which new nanomaterials are being developed and used by industry appears to exceed the pace of safety and health research and regulations, which can lead to outdated and insufficient rules. The lack of formal regulations may be limiting the use of on-site exposure monitoring, although premature regulation based on inadequate research and data may not be well received by NTRC customers and intermediate parties. A more comprehensive review of NTRC across industry sectors, NIOSH-defined critical topic areas, and engineered nanomaterials or nanotechnologies is necessary to more fully characterize the breadth and scope of NTRC's success and barriers to achieving impact.
  • Subjects:
  • Keywords:
  • ISBN:
    9780833092328
  • Publisher:
    RAND Corporation
  • Document Type:
    Text
  • Funding:
    Contract
  • Genre:
  • Place as Subject:
  • CIO:
    National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH)
  • Division:
    OD - Office of the Director
  • Topic:
    Workplace Safety & Health
  • Location:
    North America
  • Pages in Document:
    1-66
  • NIOSHTIC Number:
    nn:20060219
  • Citation:
    Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, RR-1108-NIOSH, 2015 Nov; :1-66
  • CAS Registry Number:
  • Federal Fiscal Year:
    2016
  • Performing Organization:
    RAND Corporation
  • Peer Reviewed:
    False
  • Collection(s):
  • Main Document Checksum:
    urn:sha-512:5379f0eaa68fe80ab6cfeac64d844fa8be9626fe60c1b6b0716b66074b5fb18ef0d965e533128d51e6c3a4b9544590c2b40730adeac0661b1d0a77c74e0a6ce8
  • Download URL:
  • File Type:
    Filetype[PDF - 711.19 KB ]
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