A holistic view and evaluation of health and safety at work: Enabling the assessment of the overall burden

•A comparable view of workers’ unhealthy and unsafe loads at work is enabled.•A holistic multistep approach to consider both occupational injuries and diseases is proposed.•The expected burden, in “lost days”, for each working configuration can be quantified.•An aggregate evaluation of workers’ burden to foster effective H&S interventions is now possible. The social burden of unsafe and unhealthy workplaces is extremely high, with more than a billion victims of work-related illnesses per year, but a unified and comparable view of workers’ unsafe and unhealthy loads is still missing. This paper proposes a holistic approach that enables the comparison of Health and Safety (H&S) matters by quantifying the expected damage through a unique consistent indicator (R), that is, the average number of potential lost days of a worker in a working configuration. Evaluating risks of working configurations and then defining the overall company risks, enables decision-makers to quantitatively assess the burden to make well-grounded decisions for far-sighted strategies enhancing H&S. This study proposes a four-step process that finally returns the overall risk level (R) in terms of number of lost days. These steps are structured in a way that can be implemented regardless of any contexts’ features; their actual implementation, instead, will require a quantification that is assumed to be context – country at least – dependent because it will be grounded on potentially different available datasets. An example is provided in the paper, that fits the four-step process into the Italian context, by combining three types of risks – impact, cutting, and noise – under the same indicator (R). The approach has great potential for future applications in real working contexts. The four-step process has the potential to be used as a practical tool to assess the economic impact of the actual risk load over the years.