Health and Safety
GLOSOLAN works to establish good laboratory practices on a global scale, introducing Health and Safety guidelines including use of equipment and knowledge of laboratory materials to generate awareness and ability to assess and prevent risks.
What is Health and Safety?
What is Health and Safety?
The laws, rules, and principles that are intended to keep people safe from injury or disease at work and in public places (cfr. Cambridge Dictionary).
Why is Health and Safety important?
Why is Health and Safety important?
It reduces injury and illness, as there are many lab exposures that pose a hazard to your health, your colleagues and students, and your work (data), and you may never have considered them a danger before.
How can I be safe within a laboratory environment?
How can I be safe within a laboratory environment?
Know your surroundings:
- Recognize the hazards in your lab
- Assess the risks of the hazards
- Minimize or control the the risks of the hazards
- Prepare for emergencies from uncontrolled hazards
Laboratory Risk Assessment
The risk assessment matrix is a tool designed to help determining the quantitative value of various risks in the laboratory. It is an analytical tool that determines the level of risk by plotting the likelihood of occurrence against the severity of the consequence. There are different kind of matrix for calculating health and safety risk in laboratories. In all of them severity, frequency and likelihood of identified risks are considered.
To download the matrix and compile it according to your laboratory situation, please click here
How to compile the risk assessment matrix?
How to compile the risk assessment matrix?
- First identify the risk/risks in the laboratory;
- Complete the matrix for each risk separately by:
- Determining the proper consequence severity of the risk, according to descriptions above the matrix (reported in columns D-H);
- Determining the proper likelihood of occurrence of the risk, according to descriptions on the left hand of the matrix (reported in rows 5-9);
- Once the two numbers are identified, multiply them and report the result in the table, where the axes of the two numbers intersect;
- The result of this multiplication is the quantitative value of the risk you are assessing it.
Instructions on how to fill the matrix can be also downloaded here.
How to interpret the obtained results?
How to interpret the obtained results?
To interpret the results, look at "interpreting the results" reference table, reported below (also available here):
Key documents on laboratory health and safety
Poster on Health and Safety: EN | FR | ES | RU
GLOSOLAN works to establish good laboratory practices on a global scale, introducing health and safety guidelines including use of equipment and knowledge of laboratory materials to generate awareness and ability to assess and prevent risks. This poster provides basic guidelines on laboratory safety to be adopted in soil laboratories.
These posters were developed with thanks to support from Hanane Aroui (IRD France/Senegal
