Environmental & Risk Management / Clean Building / Environmental Hazard Manager

Tracking Assessment Item History

Since assessing an area for hazardous material is vital to the maintenance of your building and providing a safe working environment, you may need to access a history of previous assessments. For example:

You are conducting a periodic assessment of your building. You want to provide the field assessor with a history of previous assessments so that they can note previous problem areas that should be carefully re-checked.
Your building had a severe mold issue, and a government agency is auditing how you abated and are now managing this issue. You need to show how often you assessed the area, how you abated the issue, and how, since abatement, you have periodically re-assessed the area to ensure that the mold has not returned.
For an area that is undergoing renovation or demolition, you need to provide the construction manager with a complete history of hazmat assessments of this area so that they are aware of issues that may arise. For example, a previous assessment may have noted that asbestos is present, but encapsulated, and so does not pose a threat if left undisturbed. Since the construction will be disturbing this instance of asbestos, the construction manager needs to be aware of its details so that they can plan for appropriate precautions.

To create a historical record of a particular area that you assess, you need to copy the assessment items from the current project to another project. For example, for a particular room, you can copy the assessment item record to a new project. Then, you use the Assessment History tab to see all assessment projects that have assessment items for this room.

To review the complete history of an area, review the Assessment History tab. You can examine how the condition, status, and so forth changed over time by looking at each assessment item sorted by the Date Assessed field.

Procedure

Follow these general steps:

Create a hazmat project for holding your data, and name it appropriately. For example, you may wish to include the date or year in the project title. The project must be for the same hazardous substance as the project from which you will copy records.
At the designated interval, copy assessment items from the current (source) project to this destination project. This entails:

Run the Manage Hazard Assessment Items task and load your source assessment project.
Select the assessment item records that you wish to copy.
Choose the Copy Selections button.
Choose the destination project (you can only choose from projects that are associated with the same hazardous substance as the current project).
The system copies the selected items from the current project to the destination project. The function does not copy all data and does not copy assigned activity items and lab results.

In the Manage Hazard Assessment Items task, select an assessment item, and move to the Assessment History tab. The system shows you all related assessment items made before or after the selected assessment item. The system sorts the assessment items by Date Assessed.
Use the DOC button to print out this history so that you can supply it to a field assessor or inspector to use in the field.

Note: You may be wondering how the program links assessment item records into a history. When the program creates a new record by copying, it generates a new value for the Item ID field, which is displayed in the grid. Thus, assessment items for a particular area will show a different value for this field.

However, the table also has an assessment_id field (which is hidden from view) and which links together assessment items from different projects into a history. The assessment_id field of all assessment items descended from the same original assessment item (via copying to other projects) have the same value -- the value of activity_log_id of the original assessment item.