Recent events (UCLA, Yale etc.) aside, I have never personally seen serious academic institutional/departmental followup response with Lessons Learned from minor accidents, major incidents, or near misses.   Having a protocol for a formal analysis (What happened?  Facts instead of departmental gossip.  What went wrong? How could this be avoided? What SOP's should change?  etc.), ensuring that the analysis is distributed to all possible stakeholders, and archiving it on an easily accessible web site is a great way of making sure that history does not repeat itself.   I have the impression that this kind of analysis is the norm at places like DuPont, but, sadly, in my own personal experience, academic institutions often fail to do so either out of liability/publicity concerns, leadership inertia/vacuum, or both.     Formal accident followups should be SOP and the importance of these should be stressed in academic safety training courses.

Rob Toreki