How Forming a Department-Specific Employee Safety Team Impacted Mitigating Risk and Improving the Safety Culture in...

Laboratory staff working in animal facilities face occupational risks beyond biological and chemical hazards. Organizations working with hazardous agents and animals must protect staff by developing safety programs focusing on risk reduction and fostering a positive safety culture.

At the Abigail Wexner Research Institute at Nationwide Children's Hospital, we formed a department-specific employee safety team tasked with rolling out the Employee Safety Bundle (ESB). The ESB outlines practices and tools to prevent incidents and ensure a safe work environment. This program requires departments with frequent Occupational Safety and Health Administration recordable incidents to develop a Quantitative Risk Assessment framework. The ESB components assist with reducing the overall risks in each area by developing procedure-specific risk mitigations. Additionally, the department-specific employee safety team must develop initiatives to improve the overall safety culture within the department.

The quantitative risk assessment tool helped us identify the high-risk areas within our animal resources core (ARC) facility. We then utilized the hierarchy of controls to develop risk mitigation plans and decrease the overall risk score in each area within the ARC facility. Additionally, this program requires annual re-evaluation and a focus on continuous improvement that has helped the animal facility reduce injuries, increase near-miss reporting, and improve the safety culture.

This risk score-based framework has evolved into a more holistic risk mitigation system that involves department staff members, senior leadership, safety, and other subject matter experts working together to improve the operations within an animal facility.