Article Summary Industrial Hygiene

¶ … Ethical Misconduct Among Industrial Hygienists in England by Burgess and Mullen (2002). There are a lot of codes of ethics published for ethical hygienists, but surprisingly few articles discussing ethics in the profession. In this article, the authors note that "failure to behave ethically might have serious and possibly fatal consequences," highlighting the need for a greater level of discussion with respect to ethics in the profession. The authors conducted a survey of 43 industrial hygienists, and found that 33 of them had witnessed ethical misconduct.

The authors provided with their survey nine different categories of ethical misconduct, thereby making clear the definition of the term. Some that were found to have occurred were data fabrication, failure to share credit on work, failure to protect confidentiality, criticizing the integrity of another hygienist for one's own gain, and plagiarism. Some of these could result in injury, but many violate the code for how industrial hygienists are supposed to conduct themselves on the job.

The authors concluded with some statements about how to deal with such breaches of ethical conduct. This work was conducted in England, but can be compared with the code of ethics that has been produced by the American Board of Industrial Hygienists (2007). For example, maintaining confidentiality is one of the standards contained within the code, as is "recognize and respect the intellectual property rights of others" (ABIH, 2007), which covers plagiarism and the sharing of credit.

The code does not, however, talk about criticizing the integrity of another hygienist, so Burgess and Mullen are essentially evaluating the ethical performance of people in the profession based on something that is not in the code of ethics. As a learning objective, understanding the role of ethics in industrial hygiene is important. The code of ethics, and articles that are written about the issue of ethics both serve to highlight what some of the key ethical issues are.

For people engaged in the practice of industrial hygiene, it is important to understand what the key issues are in the business. The article not only highlights a number of categories of issues but also that it is fairly common that industrial hygienists will cross ethical boundaries. This highlights the need for greater levels of ethical training, and mechanisms by which unethical behavior can be reported.

The ABIH notes that hygienists are obligated to report when they become aware of an unethical act, but there needs to be mechanisms available for anonymous reporting, or to have whistleblower protections in place. Thus, the article raises some important issues with regards to ethical practice in industrial hygiene. The stakes can be fairly high, so it is important that there is a higher level of training, and that there are means by which people can be held accountable for unethical behavior.

The entire culture of the profession may need to be examined, if it is true that such lapses are as common as Burgess and Mullen (2002) describe. Things may have changed since the article was published, but it is still important as a student of industrial hygiene to know where the codes of ethics used in the industry are.