Borovitsky O. Development of the Process of Managing Occupational and Ergonomic Risks at Enterprises of the Forest Industry of Ukraine

The dissertation, which is a completed scientific work, presents a solution to an significant scientific and applied problem: enhancing the management system of occupational safety and health of employees in forestry enterprises based on the introduction of the process of managing occupational and ergonomic risks, which involves identifying regularities between intensity and overload duration and the state of activity of workers when performing production tasks, taking into account their adaptation capabilities to physical overload. The dissertation examines the development of scientific perspectives on the essence of the concept «professional-ergonomic risks» within the context of production enterprises of the forest industry, which allowed them to be presented as indicators of the probable occurrence of a hazardous event of physical overload of an employee and the impact on the severity of damage to their physical health. Consequently, an algorithm for managing occupational ergonomic risks has been developed, including eleven steps, which can be conditionally divided into three stages: preparatory, primary and documentary. At the same time, it is provided that for the process of managing the mentioned earlier risks, it is necessary to take into account the hazardous factors of physical overload of the employee, which are related to the work of the direction of movement of the joints, the amount of effort, the load and the state of activity; working environment, equipment (infrastructure); its adaptation to physical overload; physical state of health, and gender of the employee. In order to develop appropriate recommendations for reducing the level of occupational and ergonomic risk, trends in the development of technological felling schemes have been highlighted based on the use of modern logging equipment with the identification of the main injury-hazardous factors, which helped to clarify the causes of injury-hazardous situations at the workplaces of employees of forestry enterprises. This made it possible to distinguish two approaches to occupational ergonomic risk assessment based on the justification of methodological approaches to occupational ergonomic risk management. The first is based on the established intensity and duration of physical overload, and the second provides for taking into account the employee's adaptation to physical overload due to the coefficients of their health and gender. In addition, an appropriate toolkit has been proposed for assessing the occupational ergonomic risk of a forest feller, which was based on the assessment of the ergonomic risk index when performing various technological processes, taking into account the working posture and the physical state of health and gender of the worker. At the same time, it was established that the biggest contribution to the value of the ergonomic risk index when felling trees and cutting branches is made by an uncomfortable working posture, while when whipping whips, loading assortments – a psychosocial factor. It was also discovered that the adaptability of forest fellers to the load deteriorates most due to an uncomfortable working posture characterized by a significant static load.