Bhuller Yadvinder, Bancroft Xaand, Deonandan Raywat, Grudniewicz Agnes, Wiles Anne, Krewski Daniel
Interdisciplinary School of Health Sciences, University of Ottawa, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada.
Telfer School of Management, University of Ottawa, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada.
Risk Anal. 2025 Jul;45(7):1926-1939. doi: 10.1111/risa.17715. Epub 2025 Feb 2.
Government agencies, international institutions, and independent experts have published approaches for the assessment and management of health and environmental risks. This includes evidence-based strategies and publications supporting risk decision-making frameworks reflecting contemporary practices, the overarching context, and governance structures for addressing known and emerging risk issues. This scoping review surveys the literature, over the last five decades, to identify key attributes of health and environmental risk decision-making and how these inherent characteristics are related to the overarching regulatory decision-making context. The findings provide insights on how these publications accounted for the circumstances and triggers at that time. This includes incorporating factors reflecting advances in science and technology, a better understanding of underlying values (e.g., societal), and an expansion in the scope and complexity required for conducting different evaluations relevant to health and environmental risks. Consequently, the evolution from linear to more expanded and holistic decision-making frameworks incorporates foundational elements, such as the well-established steps for assessing risks, while adding aspects reflecting transformative changes and paradigm shifts (e.g., the use of non-animal testing strategies for evaluating human safety). Our analysis also resulted in the generation of a consolidated listing of ten attributes: trigger/issue, regulatory context, regulatory factors, core values, risk decision-making principles, cross-cutting attributes, design (scope and steps), structure, decision-making pathway, and evidence-knowledge requirements for risk decision-making. A better understanding of this evolution in risk decision-making and the listing of key attributes will be used in future work aimed at developing considerations for next generation decision-making approaches for health and environmental risks.
政府机构、国际组织和独立专家已发布了健康与环境风险评估及管理方法。这包括基于证据的策略和出版物，以支持反映当代实践、总体背景以及应对已知和新出现风险问题的治理结构的风险决策框架。本范围综述调查了过去五十年来的文献，以确定健康与环境风险决策的关键属性，以及这些内在特征如何与总体监管决策背景相关联。研究结果提供了关于这些出版物如何考虑当时情况和触发因素的见解。这包括纳入反映科学技术进步的因素、对潜在价值观（如社会价值观）的更好理解，以及在进行与健康和环境风险相关的不同评估所需的范围和复杂性方面的扩展。因此，从线性决策框架向更广泛、更全面的决策框架的演变纳入了一些基础要素，如评估风险的既定步骤，同时增加了反映变革性变化和范式转变的方面（如使用非动物测试策略评估人类安全性）。我们的分析还生成了一份包含十个属性的综合清单：触发因素/问题、监管背景、监管因素、核心价值观、风险决策原则、交叉属性、设计（范围和步骤）、结构、决策途径以及风险决策的证据 - 知识要求。对风险决策这一演变过程以及关键属性清单的更好理解将用于未来旨在为健康与环境风险的下一代决策方法制定考量因素的工作中。
