The JCHAS Editor's Spotlight for the May / June 2019 issue of the Journal of Chemical Health and Safety is shining on:
Impact of a pilot laboratory safety team workshop
By Kali A. Miller, Kaitlin I. Tyler
Recurring academic laboratory accidents and a lack of consensus about the best approach to chemical safety culture education has led to the development of laboratory safety team (LST) programs at many research institutions in the United States. LSTs are collaborative groups that seek to improve the safety culture within a department or multiple departments. They usually consist of a partnership between departmental faculty, staff, and students and have the goal of providing concrete opportunities for all of these stakeholders to continuously improve safety practices within their department. These programs also offer a supplementary form of safety education that is designed to fit the specific culture and needs of each institution. As these programs have developed in a variety of institutions, best practices for forming and maintaining LSTs have begun to emerge. In order to better understand these best practices, we developed a pilot workshop for the 255th National American Chemical Society Meeting audience to provide attendees with the knowledge and resources to go back to their home institutions and establish LSTs or similar programs. To understand the effectiveness of this pilot workshop, we conducted a small survey of the attendees at the first presentation. Questionnaires before and after the workshop show that the workshop was well received overall. Participants became more confident in their ability to teach others about safety and gained an improved understanding of safety topics and resources. There is also evidence that the workshop changed participants perception on their own career values and their institution's values on laboratory safety. These results are promising and give us hope that programs such as this can be a useful platform for safety education.
The article can be downloaded from the URL above.
This issue includes several articles related to the 2018 CHAS Presidential Symposium on Safety in the Chemistry Laboratory, including a Foreword by 2018 ACS President Peter Dorhout. The table of contents for this issue is:
Recognizing and understanding hazards ' The key first step to safety
Robert H. Hill Jr.
A step in the right direction
Dawn C. Mason
Bringing Safety to Chemistry for Life
Ralph Stuart, Joseph M. Pickel
Impact of a pilot laboratory safety team workshop
Kali A. Miller, Kaitlin I. Tyler
Promoting safety culture:An overview of collaborative chemical safety information initiatives
Carmen I. Nitsche
Let me know if you have any questions about this.
- Ralph
Ralph Stuart, CIH, CCHO
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American Chemical Society
Division of Chemical Health and Safety
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