Question: why use these in a teaching lab instead of a regular pipet bulb so that the students develop better fine motor skills?

On July 2, 2015, at 3:51 PM, Jeffrey Lewin wrote:

We've had numerous injuries over the years with students inserting pipets in into "handypette pumps" such as:

https://wardsci.com/store/catalog/product.jsp?catalog_number=150543

Students would hold the pipet too far away and break them and stab their hands. This led to several solutions of varying results:

Training student before every lab (still got injuries)

Bbuying enough units that we could set them up in advance so students did't have to insert pipets. Worked very well although sometime the pipets came loose or students still tried to change them.

One accidental solution was when an instructor bought less expensive plastic disposable pipets, but discovered they could be washed and reused multiple times. The unintended positive is that the plastic one were much sturdier and didn't break.

We've had similar "stabbing" injuries when people try to insert glass tubes or thermometers into rubber stoppers and have actually added individual instructions in our departmental safety manual about using lubricant when doing such insertions.

Jeff

On Thu, Jul 2, 2015 at 11:25 AM, Stuart, Ralph > wrote:
Does anyone have a relatively detailed favorite Lessons Learned report for a situation which involves significant cuts from broken glassware in a lab that doesn?t involve over-pressurization of the vessel? I?m doing a training next week for undergraduate students and I?d like to make the point that it?s not always the chemistry that creates the problem. The example I have in mind could involve hot glassware that breaks when someone tries to pick it up and drops it, but similar events would be helpful as well.

Thanks for any assistance with this.

- Ralph

Ralph Stuart, CIH, CCHO
Chemical Hygiene Officer
Keene State College

ralph.stuart**At_Symbol_Here**keene.edu

--
Jeff Lewin
Departmental Laboratory Supervisor
Biological Sciences
Michigan Technological University

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