Chemical Risk Assessment for Small Businesses: Development of the Chemical Hazard Assessment and Prioritization Risk (CHAP-Risk) Tool

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

 

June 24th, 2024

Letter to Authors

 I have read and reviewed your manuscript titled “Chemical risk assessment for small business: the CHAP-Risk tool” (applsci- 3079864) submitted to APPLIED SCIENCES.

 

Manuscript presents valuable results and the programme presented seems to be a much-needed tool, as there is a great need for employee training, especially if it were free. However, costs and expenses are important everywhere, especially in small and medium-sized enterprises, and knowledge of the risks associated with chemicals is crucial, given the highest value of workers' health and lives. The presence of a free tool offering benefits in this area is invaluable. It is difficult to understand the attitude of anonymous employers or workers who say that information is too difficult to find. It is important that it reaches workers at different levels, especially those who directly use chemicals. This knowledge is very important to them.

However, after read and make a deep analysis of your manuscript I could recommend it to be published after attending the next MAJOR REVISIONS. In order to improve the quality of the manuscript I suggest a few corrections:

 Comments:

 1)      Introduction.

 ·         What is the name worth mentioning? What is it supposed to be associated with? CH (chemical) A (assessment) P (....?)

·         What information exactly is in the programme? About storage, use, handling, disposal, recycling, ….?

·         I do not have access to the programme to evaluate it. - although as I understand, it is the article that is being evaluated, not the programme. Was it really difficult to get information, maybe it should have been more intuitive.

 2.      Material and Methods.

A key issue is the lack of a basic statistical evaluation of user feedback. We do not know anything about the respondent structure (quantitatively) of people who evaluated the programme positively/negatively. Qualitative analysis, as you mentioned in the sentence "The analysis was based on standard qualitative methods [30] that explored dominant themes and trends" is insufficient.

 

3.      Results and discussion.

There is no discussion of the statistical analysis of the results in relation to groups of respondents, by job, occupational group, age group, education, etc.

As you mentioned “The qualitative analysis identified six major themes in terms of using the tool and the training received”. And these topics are not transparently further listed….

 The discussion is rich with many examples and the user comments quoted are very interesting, but there is a lack of information and reference to other programmes of this type used in Canada, or in other countries.

 Minor editorial corrections. 3.3. – typo, mistake in chapter name

If the information is to reach a wide audience, there should be a link to the programme, especially if it is a free public-release version of the tool, there could be a link to it at the end of the article, or if it is a very large file, a link to the page where it is available.

4.      Conclusions. No comments.

5.      References. Please, complete the doi, wherever possible, e.g. Reference 12) http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/annhyg/meg074, etc

 I really thank you for your consideration, and I sincerely hope these recommendations could be useful to you to improve the quality of your manuscript since the item might be important to potential readers of Applied Sciences.

Author Response

 Please see the attachment

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

First of all, I would like to congratulate the team for the development of the CHAP risk tool, which can be a very useful tool for the perception and awareness of the risks that chemicals pose to workers' health.

Regarding the manuscript a few changes are recommended:

1. recommendation to change the title, because from the content of the paper you have not really made chemical risk assessment for small enterprises or an effective presentation of the CHAP-Risk tool, but you have made an impact study, you have identified how the tool is perceived and some aspects that are necessary for its use or improvement;

2. describe in as much detail as possible the stages of the study/analysis, the number of workers in each category (executives, OHS representatives, management), the description of the areas/industries in which they carry out economic activities and, of course, the type of chemical substances, the number and duration of their exposure to the chemical substances;

3. highlighting the responses/feedback received by category, which would justify your conclusions and perhaps lead to the identification of new directions for development;

4. a brief outline on current legal frameworks, how to implement SDSs, producers' obligations and how to transmit SDSs;

5. I recommend the use of current bibliographical references (from the last five years), since in the current form more than 50% of the references are older than five years.

Author Response

Please see the attachment

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

The authors answered all of my previous comments. The paper has been improved. It is now  acceptable for publication.