.......[and the faculty are]
- explicitly assuming the leadership role for safety within your research program,
- talking about safety, and incorporating safety moments into your regular meetings,
- planning for safety, which could be as simple as a checklist or as complex as a risk assessment,
- looking out for the safety of others, both in your lab and around campus, and
- modeling proper safety behaviors for others to follow.
What I want to see some university to say is:
OK, we've screwed up here for years. Now there will be regular and mandatory OSHA Lab Safety training for all new faculty (day long training minimum with a quiz), mandatory yearly updates for all faculty, the EH&S office will only employ trained professionals (e.g., industrial hygienists, safety professionals, etc.), and EH&S has the power to step in any time they see a problem including stopping the work if needed.
Sorry, but what I see when I travel, consult, and lecture shows me that in most schools many of the faculty are ignorant of basic safety principles and couldn't correctly interpret and SDS or do a risk assessment if you had a gun to their heads, and the EH&S department is run by well-meaning facilities maintenance people.
And before you leap all over me, remember, I've consulted at even at Yale.
Monona
-----Original Message-----
From: Reinhardt, Peter <peter.reinhardt**At_Symbol_Here**YALE.EDU>
To: DCHAS-L <DCHAS-L**At_Symbol_Here**PRINCETON.EDU>
Sent: Tue, Apr 30, 2019 10:07 pm
Subject: [DCHAS-L] Perhaps of Interest: "Safety Responsibilities for Yale PIs"
DivCHAS Colleagues,
At many other universities, leadership has distributed safety messages to research faculty. With the message below, Yale has now joined that group. Our new Vice Provost for Research, Peter Schiffer, promises to send similar messages annually. I hope you find
this "best practice" encouraging. Note that the risk assessment link leads to ACS' good work.
