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High work intensity (HWI) can occur in various occupational groups and induce health disorders, which means occu-pational health risk (OHR) assessment is necessary. This article describes methodical approaches to assessing OHR caused by HWI with a possibility to examine contributions made by its specific components and transition to personified risk assessment. The suggested approaches to assessing OHR caused by HWI include subjective assessment of the factor and health self-assessment. They allow identifying additional likelihood of health disorders and performing further risk assessment when exposure to HWI grows by one unit as per separate HWI indicators describing its specific components. Personified risk assessment involves using a template created for specific HWI components (intellectual, sensory, or emotional loads; work monotony; work regime). The approaches were tested on workers with mostly mental work (n = 137, respondents’ mean age was 43.9 ± 8.01 years; mean work records were 14.5 ± 3.7 years). Calculated data of personified levels of the integral health risk were used to rank likely health outcomes as per their priority. Mental disorders and diseases involving elevated blood pressure were established to correspond to ‘high’ health risk. Myopia, strained headache, atherosclerosis of peripheral vessels, and chronic laryngitis corresponded to ‘medium’ risk. Certain disorders involving the immune mechanism, tinnitus, ischemic heart disease, and atherosclerosis of coronary vessels as well as stomach and duodenum ulcer corresponded to ‘moderate’ risk. Detailed HWI assessment made it possible to identify its leading components; the shares of sensory and emotional loads in the integral health risk reached 29.0 ± 2.4 and 25.9 ± 3.9 % accordingly (р = 0.37). It is advisable to use these findings for creating personified activities aimed at OHR mitigation.

There is a growing demand by the civil society for relevant information on the environment quality and related health risks. The state should be able to satisfy this demand and this makes the present research truly vital. It concentrates on correlating expert and non-expert opinions expressed when perceiving risk quantification. Our goal was to answer two following questions: 1) How does an average unprofessional person quantify a probability and severity when he or she hears certain verbal expressions that denominate them? 2) How can we possibly identify the assessment of health risks associated with environmental pollution factors given by the population in general or specific social groups? To find answers to these questions, we applied quantitative methods for data collection and analysis. The first stage involved collecting data on subjective correlation of a verbal probability scale with its numeric expression among people living in industrial cities. The second stage focused on testing the methodology for studying assessments of health risks associated with ambient air pollution given by the population/social groups. This methodology relied on the results obtained at the previous stage. We established that only 70 % of people actually correlated words with figures. We determined that experts tended to rate probabilities approximately by 10 % higher than “average people” did when it came down to such words as “Virtually certain” and “Very likely”. Such words as “Likely”, “Similarly likely” and “Unlikely” were also rated differently but with a smaller gap between the opinions. The study also provides a method for determining the public assessment of health associated with ambient air pollution. The research results give an opportunity to solve a practical task related to informing the population about health risks and to overcome a so-called language barrier between experts and ordinary people. For example, messages aimed for decision-makers can be adapted considering all the identified perception peculiarities.