Laboratory Research Health and Safety, a program within Environmental Health & Safety, was recently awarded the Campus Safety, Health, and Environment Management Association (CSHEMA) Innovation Award of Merit for Process Improvement. An award ceremony took place on Monday, July 9 in Baltimore, Maryland, to honor this accomplishment.
CSHEMA recognizes institutional leaders who are advancing a culture of safety on their campus and institutions with outstanding programs that improve research safety on campus with the Innovations Awards. The CSHEMA Innovation Award honors the achievement of institutions across three innovation categories in safety: safety culture, resource enhancement, and process improvement.
The Process Improvement Award recognizes successfully designed or re-engineered programs that use innovative methods of training or educational courses that improve a service in response to a campus need.
Each candidate submitted a project for the CSHEMA Award Committee to review and consider for the achievement. Laboratory Research Health & Safety Program, led by Director Judy McBride and Assistant Director Rani Jacob, submitted a project titled, A Tiered Approach to Laboratory Safety and Emergency Response Training: Providing Hands-on, Cost-effective Training to a Large Group of Students.
This innovative training model was developed to enhance safety in research and teaching laboratories. The two-tiered approach divides graduate students and teaching assistants (TAs) into an advanced tier (Tier II) and undergraduate students into a basic tier (Tier I) of training. Tier II students are enrolled in an online training program and a day-long, hands-on workshop. Tier I students will take an online basic safety course and be trained in the classes by the TAs on emergency response and use of safety equipment.
The training program is very cost effective ($1.43 per student), easy to implement, practical enough to train thousands of students per year while linking theory and practice. This will help to improve safety conditions in laboratories and other workplaces along with saving time and resources.
The program was designed so that any institution could easily implement this innovative training method to provide cost-effective and efficient hands-on and face-to-face safety training to many students.
“I believe that the group has put together a project that enhances our safety culture here at UAB,” said Timothy Key, Executive Director of UAB Research Safety. “They developed this approach in response to a request from one of the departments at UAB after an incident in a lab showed that the lab teaching assistants were not adequately prepared for such events.”
Key said that the training was so well received that the department has presented the training program to several departments across campus.
“By providing online training the hope is to address a larger number of students, especially undergraduate students that were not being reached before,” said Key. “By combining online PowerPoint presentations, videos, and quizzes the goal is to provide meaningful and applicable training in a way that promotes greater retention of the subject matter. The hands-on portion is intended to reinforce the information provided by online and didactic training sessions. The hope is that the teaching assistants and graduate students will be better prepared to respond appropriately and timely should an incident occur in their labs.”