About EBSA19 - Course G - Stopping/avoiding the little incidents before they lead to big accidents

Course description:

Fortunately most laboratories never experience a significant incident (accident, ill-health or damage to property, equipment or the environment) but what about the less serious, apparently trivial incidents that may get ignored and/or not even reported.    Such events could potentially give rise to more significant outcomes under only slightly different circumstances, e.g. more hazardous material being handled.

This one-day course aims to provide biosafety professionals, researchers and managers with an introduction to those human factors/behaviours that could contribute to the occurrence of incidents.

Through a combination of presentations by the course instructors, open plenary discussions and group exercises based on case studies of real incidents, by the end of the course participants will be able to:

• Understand what leading and lagging indicators are and how they can be used to measure safety performance
• Appreciate the different types of human failure and through examination of case studies, understand how human failure can contribute to incidents occurring.
• Apply this knowledge to:
  
  • analyse work practices and develop interventions to reduce the likelihood of incidents occurring

develop meaningful safety performance indicators

CWA16335:2011 Biosafety professional competence references:

7.2.5 Human factors

The biosafety professional shall be able to understand human factors (e.g. behaviour, reliability, ergonomics) leading to intentional and unintentional errors. The biosafety professional shall have the skills to influence behaviours and risk perception, and be persuasive in promoting good biosafety and biosecurity practices taking into account cultural and socio-economic considerations

7.2.11 Good microbiological techniques (GMT)
The biosafety professional shall be able to understand and apply good microbiological techniques in order to guide staff to enable them to create and maintain a safe working environment (workplace and workflow).

7.2.16 Incident and accident investigation

The biosafety professional shall understand methods of incident (including near misses) and accident investigation and shall be able to apply them and shall contribute to actions to prevent reoccurrence.

7.2.17 Biorisk management programme

The biosafety professional shall be able to develop and support the implementation of a biorisk management programme and understand how the elements (e.g. physical, personal and informational biosecurity measures) in such a programme are interrelated so as to achieve the objectives of the programme. The biosafety professional shall be able to understand and apply the core principles and practices associated with a management system approach that incorporates continual improvement and be able to communicate them.

Instructors:
Jillian Deans
Paul McDermot