About Pre conference course A - Biological Risk Assessment – from paper to practice

Instructors
Adam Stevenson and Wendy Shell

It is known that human reliability and behaviour have a major impact on an individuals ability to work safely in a laboratory; and yet these same factors can be overlooked when assessing the risks in that laboratory. This pre-conference course will take your risk assessments to the next level through ensuring that human reliability is accounted for in risk assessments and introduce the concept of safety critical task analysis.

This pre-conference course is aimed at those individuals who are already risk assessors or understand the risk assessment process and provide attendees with the skills and knowledge to complete safety critical task analysis. It will not only consist of theory sessions on risk assessment and human reliability but also a visit to teaching laboratories at ITM and so taking the biological risk assessment process from paper to practice.

Learning objectives

1. Identify and assess significant biological risks from tasks.
2. Describe techniques of risk assessment and who to involve in the process.
3. Identify and describe the supporting information sources to aid in the assessment process.
4. Undertake a safety critical task analysis (human HAZOP/human reliability study)
5. Identify the factors that impact on human reliability and behaviour.
6. Identify the appropriate preventative and mitigative control measures to reduce biological risk in an in vitro or in vivo containment facility.
7. Identify controls to reduce or mitigate for human frailty.
8. Implement the hierarchy of control in relation to reducing the risk from the tasks.
9. Identify monitoring arrangements should be in place to prevent harm from human frailty
10. Identify additional actions that are required to control the activity and how they can be monitored and maintained into safe working practices.
11. Implement a communication and training strategy to disseminate risk assessment findings.
12. Review emergency arrangements to ensure they have suitable controls to reduce or mitigate for human frailty.

CWA 16335:2011, annex C reference

• 7.2.5 Human Factors
• B.12 Human Factors The Biosafety professional should ensure that human factors (e.g. behavious, relaibility, ergonomics) leading to intentional and unintentional errors are reflected in risk assessment, accident investigation, training and other relevant tasks. c2.1.2.5 Risk management, risk reduction methods and heirarchy of controls