IEM research labs at the start to safety 2.0

Abstract

Published data from various countries worldwide demonstrate that safety in research laboratories is a lively and insufficiently resolved problem. The number of events with significant consequences or even fatalities is relatively high. A description of the situation in the USA is readily available, where significant institutions have been systematically working on improving safety in university research laboratories for about 15 years. Our experience from IEM confirms the seriousness of this topic. At the institute, we have recorded several accidents in research laboratories in the last 15 years, at least two of which were serious. It cannot be said that this topic is not being paid attention. However, it seems that safety is not effectively supported in the basic situation that every worker/student approaching a new research topic faces: How do the conditions that my new research brings differ from those with which I already have experience? In other words, effective change management is not achieved in the conditions of a research laboratory. In industry, the management of change (MoC) task has been identified as one of the key safety management tasks for decades. Many procedures have been developed to support effective MoC. We believe that the experience from industrial MoC can also be used to improve safety management in research laboratories. We have initiated research aimed at developing and testing a recommended procedure for ensuring safety in research, which will use industrial experience with MoC and available experience from improving safety in foreign research laboratories. This procedure should be simple and convincing enough that our researchers can and want to use it consistently. Creating such a procedure seems to be an ambitious but realistic milestone that can be described as safety 2.0.