Contents
What is the meaning of safety first?
So to put it together’Safety First’ means to put the condition of being safe from harm, injury or loss before other matters; making safety of considerable importance.
What do you mean by safety first in first aid?
When people are injured or suddenly fall ill, the scene around them is often chaotic. Concerned bystanders, family members and emergency services personnel are all reacting and responding to the incident simultaneously, and the incident scene itself may pose dangers.
- An emergency care provider knows to put his or her own safety first, even before the safety of an ill or injured person.
- Putting yourself in danger to help someone can make the situation worse, both for yourself and for those around you.
- When responding to an emergency: your safety starts with SETUP,
This mnemonic device can help you remember the important points of making sure it is safe to provide care:
S is for Stop, Pause to identify hazards. E is for Environment, Consider your surroundings. T is for Traffic, Be careful along roadways. U is for Unknown Hazards, Consider things that are not apparent. P is for Personal Safety, Use protective barriers.
Always pause for a moment before approaching an emergency and look for obvious hazards. Consider the possibility of hidden dangers. If the scene is unsafe, do not approach. If the location you are already in becomes unsafe, get out! When caring for someone, a provider can be exposed to blood or other potentially infectious body fluids.
Disposable gloves are the most commonly used barrier. Make sure there is always a fresh supply of non-latex gloves in your first aid kit. Inspect gloves for damage or tears when putting them on. If damaged, replace them immediately. After providing care, always remove contaminated gloves carefully. Even after using gloves, use soap and water to clean your hands and any exposed skin. Use an alcohol-based hand sanitizer if soap and water are not available. If a person requires rescue breaths, use a shield or CPR mask with a one-way valve to minimize direct mouth-to-mouth contact. A face shield can prevent mouth, nose, and eye exposure when there is a possibility of splashing or spraying. If you don’t have personal protective equipment during a first aid situation, you can improvise. A towel, plastic bag, or some other barrier can help avoid direct contact.
SETUP for success and remember to put your own safety first in an emergency situation. ASHI and MEDIC First Aid Training Centers: Don’t forget there’s more than just our emergency care programs for purchase in the online store within your TC portal. Prepare for your next class by stocking up on gloves, barriers, masks, and more.
Why safety is our first priority?
Safety has a direct correlation to employee care and the quality of the employee experience. –
While this may seem obvious, it is worth mentioning that injuries in the workplace are horrible for the employee, no matter how small. Injuries or deaths don’t just affect the one employee, though. They are a huge blow to morale of the entire staff. Employees are less likely to enjoy their experience with a company if they feel their safety is being disregarded.
Safety has a direct correlation to employee retention,
Similarly to the point above, employees are more likely to stay with a company longer if they are valued. Training makes workers smarter and more capable of keeping themselves safe. With safety measures in place and training provided, the burden of worrying about safety and health is minimized for the employees.
What is the first step in safety?
Recognizing and understanding hazards — The key first step to safety , May–June 2019, Pages 5-10 Chemical and laboratory safety needs to be an integral part of the education of chemists and other science-based professionals, such as teachers, microbiologists, artists, and researchers. Concern and recognition of importance of safety within the chemical enterprise and the American Chemical Society (ACS) has been increasing for the past several years, including calls for incorporating chemical/laboratory safety education into the chemistry curriculum. ACS has produced many publications that seek to promote safety through improved safety culture and safety education, set a requirement for all ACS journals to include safety in submissions, and has recently make safety a core value.1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 Nevertheless, chemical and laboratory safety education is missing from the academic curriculum, being replaced by a few safety training sessions that do not teach critical thinking safety as would an education.8, 9 Safety education should be based upon the four principles of safety: R ecognize hazards, A ssess risks of hazards, M inimize risks of hazards, P repare for emergencies, easily remembered by the acronym RAMP,9, 10, 11, 12 Using RAMP consistently when working with chemicals in the laboratory provides a strong basis for safety. We all recognize that any type of work, including laboratory work, is not without risk but using RAMP helps minimize risks and helps protect us all from serious injuries. Learning about the many facets of RAMP is an important task that requires continuous effort to build a long-term safety education that will serve students well as they pursue their chosen careers. Safety education provides the necessary knowledge needed by graduates to make critical decisions about safety in their work and just as important it builds a strong caring and ethic about safety so that the graduates actually think about safety when they approach a new situation. A common error in many incidents is not even thinking about safety before starting an operation, which can result in an event or incident that when coupled with ignorance of safety can have serious results. Figure 1 illustrates how chemical/laboratory safety education provides strong basic knowledge and understanding of safety, which leads to the ability to critically think safety, which when reinforced continually over an extended period leads to caring for safety. Caring for safety in turn leads one to seek knowledge and understanding about safety issues and to think critically about safety. While using RAMP is a necessary move toward safer work in chemistry and in the laboratory, it cannot be used if the first step is not fully done — Recognize and understand hazards. If you have not recognized and you do not fully understand the hazards, you will not be able to assess the risks of hazards, minimize the risks of hazards, or prepare for emergencies. This paper focuses on the importance of recognizing and understanding hazards. Several examples of incidents are presented and analyzed. A list of common laboratory hazards are presented to illustrate what should be covered in any effort to educate and prepare graduates for safety issues in their future endeavors. Some examples of safety education for selected types of hazards are presented. In this section, several incidents are briefly described and analyzed to illustrate the failure to recognize and understand hazards. While only a few examples are presented here, the textbook Laboratory Safety for Chemistry Students includes more than 100 incident summaries and more than 70% of those involved failing to recognize and understand hazards.11 As you read about these incidents, you should consider that many may have occurred because the person(s) seemingly did not think or seem to These six separate incidents all have one thing in common — the hazards were not recognized or not fully understood. The consequences ranged from minor to serious. Each of these incidents brings into question as to whether the person even considered or thought about safety. These are not isolated cases of failing to recognize or understand hazards but rather a common occurrence among incidents (as indicated above with >70% of over 100 incidents did not recognize hazards 11 ). Most often the Safety education should include basic information about recognizing and understanding common hazards. Table 1, Table 2, Table 3, Table 4 list the most common chemical and laboratory hazards encountered in laboratory work — these are not complete listings but it captures most hazards.11 As can be seen from the four tables, there are a lot of hazards. None of us can be experts in all of these areas, nevertheless all chemists should have a good understanding of the most common hazards that we will Many of incidents occur because hazards were not recognized or understood. Most academic institutions are not presently incorporating safety education into their curriculum, and this contributes to the many incidents that do occur in laboratories. While the reasons for safety education not being included in the chemistry curriculum are not understood, it is clear that safety education is just not a priority and the impact is clear to those selecting new graduates. Employers are getting Robert H. Hill, Jr. (Retired) Stone Mountain, GA 30087, United States (e-mail: ).
R.H. Hill R.H. Hill American Chemical Society Committee on Chemical Safety American Chemical Society Committee on Chemical Safety American Chemical Society Committee on Chemical Safety American Chemical Society Committee on Chemical Safety Jyllian Kemsley American Chemical Society Committee on Chemical Safety American Chemical Society R.H. Hill
Although there is a growing field of research focusing on university laboratory safety, accidents in such contexts still occur relatively frequently. Therefore, it is significant to summarize current research status and gaps, and to propose future research directions in the field of university laboratory safety. In this paper, a bibliometric analysis method was applied to gain an overall view of the developments, focus areas, and trends in this field of safety research. A total of 219 scientific publications on university laboratory safety were identified and screened from the database of Web of Science, covering 44 countries or regions, 254 research institutions, 575 authors, 126 publication sources, and 70 subject categories. Bibliometric data such as annual growth trend and distribution of subject categories were analyzed by using descriptive statistics. The most productive and influential countries, institutions, authors, and their cooperation networks were identified from co-citation maps created by VOSviewer. Further analysis was carried out to find out the core publications and publication sources in this field. Insights in the focus areas and research topics over time were obtained through terms co-occurrence analysis. The results indicate that university laboratory safety is a highly multidisciplinary research field. However, it is still a young discipline and belongs to the minority research field when compared with other safety domains. Several avenues for future research are identified to advance and make progress in this field. This paper proposes a new method to evaluate laboratory safety management based on machine learning that aims to address the shortcomings of traditional laboratory safety evaluation methods, including poor accuracy, large influence of human factors, and lack of a unified evaluation system. In this paper, the safety data of laboratories in Southwest University were collected using a safety checklist, and the weight of each factor affecting laboratory safety was analyzed using a Fuzzy Analytic Hierarchy Process (FAHP). The simulation results showed that the model gave a more accurate and reasonable safety risk level of the laboratory, verified the rationality and feasibility of the established method, and realized potential loopholes in the process of laboratory management and college students’ operations. According to the evaluation results, the machine learning principle and the existing maintenance knowledge of the evaluation knowledge base are applied to provide effective measures and suggestions for users to complete the process of risk assessment. Through risk assessment, the professional skill and the incident control could be improved. The model was easy to operate and has a good application value for ensuring the personal and property safety of laboratory users. Universities are places where young people prepare themselves to work as professionals in different areas. In the process, some students are exposed to educational spaces such as laboratories. Their lab work may involve exposure to and use of harmful substances that could cause temporary or permanent injury or damage to their health, including fatalities. Based on the aforementioned, the objective of this study was the development of a questionnaire that would allow to establish a relationship between accidents in academic laboratories and the institutiońs safety climate at several public higher education institutions in Northwest Mexico. Through a non-probabilistic sampling of convenience type, a questionnaire was applied to 438 selected students of different academic levels. Some of the results indicate that the questionnaire has adequate psychometric properties, as well as, the existence of a positive moderate association between laboratory accidents and an institutiońs safety climate. Finally, we concluded that the absence of institutional safety commitments contributes to increased accidents in laboratories. Therefore, it would be beneficial to implement improvements of safety measures that include training in safety issues and the psychosocial aspects that encourage the implementation of protective actions. We developed an evidence-based continuous quality improvement (CQI) cycle for laboratory safety as a method of utilizing survey data to improve safety in a public health laboratory setting.
• Expert Opinion : The CQI cycle begins with the solicitation of laboratory staff input via an annual survey addressing potential chemical, physical and radiological hazards associated with multiple laboratory activities. The survey collects frequency, severity and exposure data related to these activities in the context of the most pathogenic organisms handled at least weekly. • Gap Analysis: Step 2 of the CQI cycle used survey data to identify areas needing improvement. Typically, the traditional two-dimensional risk assessment matrix is used to prioritize mitigations. However, we added an additional dimension – frequency of exposure – to create three-dimensional risk maps to better inform and communicate risk priorities. • Mitigation Measures: Step 3 of the CQI cycle was to use these results to develop mitigations. This included evaluating the identified risks to determine what risk control measures (elimination, substitution, engineering, administrative or PPE) were needed. In the 2016 iteration of the CQI cycle described here, all mitigations were based on administrative controls. • Evaluation and Feedback: The last step of the CQI cycle was to evaluate the inferred effects of interventions through subsequent surveys, allowing for qualitative assessment of intervention effectiveness while simultaneously restarting the cycle by identifying new hazards.
Here we describe the tools used to drive this CQI cycle, including the survey tool, risk analysis method, design of interventions and inference of mitigation effectiveness. Laboratory researchers and students may expose to hazardous and toxic chemicals. Implementation of the Occupational Health, Safety, and Environment Management System (OHSEMS) has become a critical aspect in higher education. This study presents an overview of the evaluation of the implementation of the OHSEMS in higher education laboratories. The implementation of the OHSEMS is to prevent occupational accidents in the laboratory. The study design is a semiquantitative descriptive study. The aim of the study is to evaluate the implementation of the OHSEMS in higher education institution laboratories by evaluating the percentages of OHSEMS compliance in higher education laboratories. Five aspects are evaluated: occupational health, safety, and environment (OHSE) policy and commitment, planning, implementation, evaluation, and management review. The result shows that the average compliance with the OHSE policy and commitment aspect is 59.4% and for the planning, implementation, evaluation, and management review, the average compliance percentage are 33.0%, 65.3%, 26.0%, and 0.0%, respectively.
Robert H. Hill, Jr. (Retired) Stone Mountain, GA 30087, United States (e-mail: ). : Recognizing and understanding hazards — The key first step to safety
What is the best definition for safety?
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Warning signs, such as this one, can improve safety awareness, Safety is the state of being “safe”, the condition of being protected from harm or other danger. Safety can also refer to the control of recognized hazards in order to achieve an acceptable level of risk.
