Challenges for Health and Safety in Higher Education and Research Organisations

Olga Kuzmina, Stefan Hoyle, Olga Kuzmina, Stefan Hoyle

• Publisher: Royal Society of Chemistry
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781839162817
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Tecnologia e ingegneria
• Subtopic: Salute e sicurezza sul lavoro

This book provides a summary of the main obstacles for creating and maintaining high standards of health and safety in higher education and research organisations. The obstacles include high staff turnover and an uncertain and constantly evolving research environment, small groups lacking unified management structure, deadline time pressures, restricted funding models and existing "old school" culture. Often the Health and Safety specialists and personnel managers in these organisations find themselves reiterating the same information, which gets lost as soon as the new cohort of workers arrives.

Providing insight into methods of managing health and safety, training, and supervision, which help to build a strong and reliable health and safety system, this book is a collection of "best practices" from experienced safety professionals and researchers in Europe and the United States. These experiences demonstrate how health and safety professionals have overcome these issues and provide readers with ideas and models they can use in their own organisations. The information contained within is aimed at health and safety professionals and managers in universities and research organisations conducting scientific and engineering research with transient workers and students worldwide.

CHAPTER 1

Introduction to Challenges for Health and Safety in Research

O. KUZMINA^*a AND S. HOYLE^*a

^a Imperial College London, South Kensington Campus, SW7 2AZ, UK, ^*E-mail: [email protected], ^*E-mail: [email protected]

Results from the University and Research Institutions survey are presented in this chapter revealing what are the most common challenges faced by health and safety professionals, managers and researchers in these organisations. Barriers discovered are collated in five categories: physical, economical, organisational, behavioural and industry specific. Where appropriate this chapter directs the reader to a relevant chapter for further in-depth analysis. The appendix at the end of the chapter is a collection of feedback from survey responders on how workplace health and safety, in their view, could be improved.

Post COVID19 Note

This is the first time I have been involved with writing and helping to produce a book. All was going well; chapter drafts were being sent to us by the various authors and we enjoyed reading about experiences and the challenges faced in our sector (we hope you do too!). Our day-to-day work was busy and my team were focused on providing great advice and support to our academic colleagues. We were preparing for various challenges and reviewing how we could improve and provide staff and students with skills to apply principles of risk assessment to their work. Then on 18th March our university was effectively closed, and all work was stopped due to COVID19.

The effect of this was acute – labs having to be safely shut down in a very short period of time, and stressful for all involved due to the logistics of being able to achieve this while also thinking about the potential impact on work, life, family and our future.

It is June 5th and in the UK the lockdown is being eased. Olga and I must admit that for the last few months this chapter has been left to gather dust while we worked remotely to support our Departments in their decision making, and provided advice on assessments for work on COVID19 related projects. For the last two weeks I have returned to our campuses in London to help with planning for the gradual reintroduction of staff and students into our buildings and for work to start again in this ‘new normal’.

Many of the chapters in this book have been written and completed before the COVID19 crisis, however I think the experiences are still relevant to practitioners in our sector and beyond, even with the introduction of social distancing and other COVID19 controls. The COVID19 work requirements will require us as a profession to adapt and be even more innovative in our approaches. We don't believe that higher education, and in fact most workplaces, will be able to return to pre COVID19 working for a while yet. Looking through the chapter titles our authors have provided, you can see that the challenges to operating successfully with social distancing and other strategies to reduce infection will require significant thought and planning. Therefore, we think we can confidently say that a revised edition of this book will contain reflections by our returning authors (and new ones) on how they and their workplaces adapted to COVID19 and how it influenced their approaches.

Crucially I would say that in my experience so far during this crisis, the work done by technical staff, admin support and estates to get buildings and procedures ready for a phased return of researchers has been magnificent. Academic leadership from our Departments and Faculty has been excellent, and we have all pulled together to provide support to each other and direction through these difficult times. We are on the cusp of having the first few researchers return to work on the 8th June, with more returning over the coming weeks. Currently the plan for our Departments is to achieve up to 25% occupancy of research buildings using cohort models or similar that allow lab-based researchers within a department to complete their lab work while remaining socially distant. Where this is not possible, other control measures must be used. Departments have ‘COVID19 oversight’ management teams to receive feedback from the researchers to ensure procedures reflect their needs. My team have produced ‘return to work’ induction materials delivered via online learning platforms to ensure researchers are reassured that buildings are safe to return to, and to provide information on the new procedures for them and their colleagues to work safely. Face-to-face inductions and training are moving online which creates additional challenges. The next large piece of work for us is to support our colleagues in teaching to plan for lab practicals for returning students in October.

All areas of health and safety described in this book will be impacted by the reaction to the COVID19 crisis, those of us in health and safety operations are in a unique position to provide advice and support to many operational areas. The changes to our working practices and behaviours will be profound, but we hope that it will lead to improved communication and trust between health and safety advisers, academics and students. Then, no matter what the conditions, we will achieve a safe working environment and a healthy balance between work and home.

1.1 Introduction

Research laboratories provide a unique environment of continually evolving work, varying levels of individual competence and increasingly shared workspaces between different projects and research groups. Health and safety management in research laboratories faces unique challenges to ensure that science and knowledge is advanced without being a barrier to scientific progress. Health and safety, rather than being a barrier, needs to be an enabler to these aims in these dynamic and challenging environments.

A recent review and critique of academic lab safety ¹ highlights how little progress has been made over the past ten years to improve safety practices and culture in the academic environment. The aims of this book are to examine some of these challenges in detail, from the perspective of the health and safety practitioner, researcher and academic. This book is an analysis of health and safety management in the research laboratory environment across a broad spectrum of topics (predominantly within the university sector). As well as literature reviews and chapters on specific topics by individual experts we have revisited a survey, the results of which were first published in Nature. ² It is interesting to note the differences seven years on and reflect on why these have occurred and, most importantly, what can be improved to support researchers and enable safe scientific progress.

What are the challenges that modern researchers face and how do these impact on safety culture and the implementation of a safety management system? Various barriers have been identified ^2,3 or conjectured in previous studies. The shift in focus from theory, reflection and evolution of ideas to milestones, defined end points and real-world applications with monetary value has significantly changed the economic landscape at many universities. Academic and research careers are hard to achieve and maintain, with pressure from internal reviews, funding bodies, politicians, the public and business to ensure continual progress and value for money. Obtaining funding to do research is extremely competitive, even at the most prestigious institutions. Time is critical to ensuring work that is funded is then completed on time and within budget. Key stakeholders are the organisations hosting the research. They must ensure that their estates and infrastructure can keep pace with technical requirements, the need for flexible lab spaces and deliver a modern comfortable environment for study and work. The need for a physical space to be able to accommodate diverse research activities while achieving the lowest impact on the environment has never been greater, more challenging and expensive.

These factors have an impact on end user health and safety operations in various ways. From the need to ‘take a shortcut’ due to time pressure to meet a milestone, install an item of equipment in a less than optimal lab environment with insufficient cooling or extraction, to working in an overcrowded lab space. From the lab bench it can appear that the organisation or university is not managing its space with their scientific requirements or health and safety in mind, potentially leading to a poor relationship between researchers and ‘central services’ and poor safety culture. A recent review of what researchers think of the culture they work in by The Wellcome Trust ⁴ indicated that ‘their working culture is best when it is collaborative, inclusive, supportive and creative, when researchers are given time to focus on their research priorities, when leadership is transparent and open, and when individuals have a sense of safety and security’. But too often research culture is not ‘at its best’.

It is critical that health and safety in a research lab environment is practicable to those working in the labs and those that support the researchers (technicians, estates staff and contractors). Over the last 20 years there has been a definite shift of approach in health and safety from prescriptive top-down management to a consultative approach to facilitate this.

Team leaders are responsible for their group members and reliant on their PhD students, research assistants and postdoctoral researchers to ensure their projects are progressed. These individuals will have different technical competencies as well as different attitudes towards health and safety. Their previous training, either formal or informal will determine their personal attitudes and approach to safety in the lab environment. Those in the lab face the risks on a day-to-day basis and make critical decisions about risk based on their competence and the prevailing culture they are working in. They are constantly monitoring experiments and adjusting processes and procedures based on previous results. A key skill for researchers is to be able to identify when a risk has changed significantly and be able to either ask for help or devise a suitable control measure. How do researchers gain these skills? Is it trial and error? Or, is there a need to integrate risk, hazard and safety considerations into undergraduate degree courses formally and on a wider basis across the sector?

On a day-to-day basis, academic leaders are reliant on individual members of their research groups to ensure the work is done safely and the labs managed appropriately. The researchers are then reliant on the academic to continue to gain funding to continue research. This needs to be maintained to ensure work progresses, careers are successful and scientific knowledge improves. If the working environment is not optimal it is foreseeable that health and safety could be a secondary consideration and either ignored or bypassed.

The nature of cutting-edge research science in a multi-disciplinary setting (science, engineering and medicine) can lead to a focus by health and safety support services on bureaucratic solutions. This is driven by the regulatory landscape of the host country, and the need to comply with separate Regulations relating to individual hazards and risks. For example, in the UK a laboratory could be subject to multiple regulatory requirements depending on the hazards and risks they are dealing with. These hazards and risks are often fundamental to the research, restricting the ability to substitute hazards with those which are less hazardous. The lab worker normally experiences this as a large volume of paperwork, which from their perspective can be thought of as a barrier to completing research activity in a timely manner. The worker may perceive it as unhelpful and a way for the institution to ‘cover their own backs’. Chapter 2 of this book examines how these risks should be managed from a legal perspective to ensure that compliance and a safe working environment can be achieved.

Technology has reduced barriers to international communication, resulting in increased opportunities for research and collaboration. Scientific research groups are international in composition. Individuals not only bring their personal experiences and attitudes to the workplace but also their cultural influences. The short-term nature of most research contracts requires scientists to continually seek further employment, either at home or abroad, so these cultural influences on the approach to health and safety are a significant factor when assessing health and safety culture within the workplace.

On the other hand, technology, and specifically combined software solutions, do not appear to have been able to be fully utilised. The challenge of creating a flexible system of interactive online assessment forms, health and safety training records, computerised lab notebooks and health and safety management software is difficult to achieve across a large teaching and research organisation with multiple disciplines. The researcher is then confronted with a fragmented system within their organisation that can be inefficient and confusing.

Are health and safety practices in research laboratories less stringent than in other sectors? In a manufacturing environment, process-related safety rules are followed. These rules may seem to be excessive and are often criticised by safety professionals. ⁵ The impression is that industry and manufacturing have a tighter control of health and safety due to adherence to requirements set by quality control or safety management systems, fewer changes in established processes, strict policies related to employment, and are more sensitive to the financial impact of delays to business activities. In 2019 the ACS President Elect of the American Chemical Society (ACS) ran an initiative on collaborations and safety, specifically “Bridging the (Safety) Gap between Academia & Industry”. ⁶ As researchers move into industry and vice a versa there is an opportunity to identify what these differences are and whether they can be harnessed to improve safety culture in both sectors.

1.2 Survey Results Comparison

I...