The Lab Safety Gurus
Discover the secrets to enhancing laboratory safety without the hassle of navigating complex regulations and modifying established practices.
Tune in to the enlightening discussions led by the knowledgeable Dan the Lab Safety Man and infectious disease behaviorist Sean Kaufman. Together, they explore a wide range of lab safety subjects on a weekly basis.
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The Lab Safety Gurus
Crafting a Fear-Free Safety Stand Down Experience in Laboratories
Discover the keys to fostering a positive safety culture in the laboratory with the guidance of Sean Kaufman and myself, Dan Scungio. Together, we navigate the often-misunderstood realm of safety stand downs, dissecting the delicate balance between halting work for safety education and the unintended consequence of discouraging incident reporting. Our conversation promises to equip you with a nuanced understanding of how to initiate a stand down that unifies and educates your team, rather than fostering an atmosphere of punishment. We go beyond the surface, scrutinizing the decision-making process and exploring proactive measures to embed a safety-first mentality within your organization.
Sean and I also pull back the curtain on the practical application of safety stand downs, sharing tangible examples like the steps taken to prevent blade cuts among laboratory professionals. We critique the introduction of new equipment and procedures, addressing the challenges of implementing change while maintaining a vigilant, learning-centric environment. This episode is an invitation to join us at the forefront of lab safety innovation, where we introduce our STAND approach — a blueprint for proactive safety pauses that can transform your lab's safety culture. As we peel back the layers of this critical issue, we encourage you to engage with us and become an advocate for a safer, more informed laboratory workplace.
Welcome to the Lab Safety Guru's Podcast. I'm Dan Scungio.
Speaker 2:And I'm Sean Cawthon, and together we're providing safety insights for those working in laboratory settings. Doing safetytogether.
Speaker 1:Alright, welcome back. Ladies and gentlemen, good to have you here for another podcast today. I'm hoping that we're going to have a good conversation. I know we're going to have a good conversation about safety stand downs. I definitely have some opinions about that what that is and what that means, and I'm sure my friend Sean does too. What do you think, sean, what do you know about safety stand downs?
Speaker 2:Well, thank you, dan, for doinggosh. Safety stand downs are a pretty scary thing for me and I have to tell you this we may have differences of opinion on this one. It'll be neat to see what your thoughts are. We haven't talked ahead of time on this, but I have seenI know I have seen safety stand downs and, yes, there is no doubt Sometimes we need to pause and take time and take a look at what we're doing, certainly if one incident after another, after another after another happens. But there is a downside to it, dan. I have seen that people, when we have a stand down, I see people on the other side of that stand down say well, you know what, I may not report other incidents because I can't afford another stand down, and that worries me. You know what I'm saying, dan. That type of response worries me.
Speaker 1:That is a real concern and when you're thinking about that from a maybe a clinical lab kind of perspective you can't stop things from going on. You can't stop the work completely and shut down Then that's what it means to me. So I just want to step back a little bit and kind of talk about what I think a safety stand down should be and maybe what I have seen in my time in lab safety. In my head, I think a lab safety stand down is this Something has happened or maybe multiple things have happened that are similar, and we need to stop operations completely until we can talk to everybody on staff about it, talk about whatever the solution is that's going to be put into place, educate them about it, get their attention, get their attendance and sign in and then go back to work. Is that kind of what you think of when you think of safety stand down?
Speaker 2:Well, yeah, you know, it depends on the scope.
Speaker 2:Now, if you're looking at a safety stand down of, say, one lab and let's keep in mind too, dan, we're talking to laboratorians out there that may be in diagnostic labs, they may be in research labs, they may be in public health labs and if the scope is large, meaning you've got several labs and you're doing a safety stand down because maybe there's been reoccurring incidents and you're doing a large scale you know you're basically standing down a large scale operation.
Speaker 2:That concerns me a lot more than what you just described. If you do a pause work, if you do, you know, hey, we're going to take a quick time out here, because we're going to use this as an opportunity to review an incident or an accident or a failure. We're going to all learn from it and then we're going to proceed, moving forward as a unified team. That makes me feel much better than hey we're going to pause, we're going to make everybody go through mandatory training and no matter what you've done, no matter what performance is out there, you know we're going to. It's almost and I hate saying it, dan it's almost like a punishment, and I don't want safety to ever be a punishment.
Speaker 1:Right, and what you describe is exactly what happens. Because people don't. They don't want to go through this. Even if you're not on the management side and you're worried about production or turnaround time or whatever else is going on in the kind of laboratory you're in, the employees don't want to have to go through because they're going to look at it as a punishment. And so, yes, you're going to have less transparency, less reporting of safety incidents, and that does happen in safety, unfortunately, when you focus on certain things. So, from a behavioral aspect, what is the best way to conduct a stand down so it doesn't feel like a punishment? I don't know if I know the answer to that, gosh.
Speaker 2:You know, I know we have several podcasts scheduled this week that we're going to be talking about compliance and accountability and even onboarding and offboarding. Again, dan, I have family traditions and I know you do too. You have a special family and within our family, within our home, there are certain expectations and certain rules, and you know it's almost like if an individual comes into an organization and is not familiar with this type of activity, then it can be taken the wrong way. But if you know if it's sold the right way, you know if we actually tell people that listen, when something goes wrong in this organization, we are expected to share it, to review it, to determine a root cause of it so that it doesn't happen again. And if that expectation is made clear and we have a process for that expectation, then you're beginning to foster a culture that is going to look at this not as a punishment but just as part of, you know, day-to-day operations.
Speaker 1:I don't know what are your thoughts Right? So, no, I think that's the case. But when you look at the different kinds of labs and the different people in charge of the labs and the different people who oversee safety in the labs, I guess that leads me down the road to the next question, which is when do you conduct a safety stand-out? Do you wait until there's two incidents, four, six, what is the magic number if it's a certain kind of incident, or do you have to make a decision based on the type of incident it is? This one caused somebody to get hurt, this one caused somebody to get seriously hurt? We better do a safety stand-out. Do you make a determination based on what? On the cause, on the number, on the issue, on the Maybe there's a manufacturer problem? Where do you make that decision and who should make that decision?
Speaker 1:Those are all things that I think. These are the things I think that confuse people, and so I don't hear about a lot of people conducting safety stand-outs in laboratories. I have done so. I have done it in my career, at the behest of my leadership. We need to do this, we need to do this now. I have requested safety stand-outs and leadership said nah, I don't think we need to, this is okay. So I've been on kind of both sides of that decision.
Speaker 2:Well, dan, in the past, when have you Because that's something I've obviously been approaching and asked my thoughts on that, but what have been the triggers for you in the past for safety stand-outs?
Speaker 1:So I'll use a particular example only, because I have done three safety stand-outs on this same item in my career on the same incident type, and that is in a histology laboratory. So if you don't know histology, they are cutting tissues, they are cutting blocks and they're doing frozen sections on fresh tissue from the operating room.
Speaker 1:And the blades they use to cut are large and they are sharp, sharp, sharp blades, and they have blade guards in place and they have all these tools so that you don't have to use, you don't actually have to touch the blade while you're doing it. But people still continue to have injuries with blades, and so the first time it happened, we had a new director over the histology area and she said oh no, I want you to help me conduct a safety stand-out. We've had four incidents of cuts throughout the system. So we did that, we did an education, we implemented some new tools. We gave everybody a magnet tip brush so that they could remove the blade, rubber tip forceps so that they could put the new blade on, and we did the inventory and make sure there was those tools at every station wherever we had a blade. And then we did education with the staff. But we did stop doing the work of cutting, which was a not as something that's easy to do in that kind of a setting. And so we had to be quick. We had to. From my perspective, it was hard to do that safety stand-down because I had to be fast, I had to get through all the labs and I had to do it quickly so that work could start up again. And we put all the tools in place and, you know again, made sure that, did inventory and make sure everything was there and that the education was complete, got all the so, you know, and then a few years later we started to see cuts creep up again and we started to do a different kind of stand-down.
Speaker 1:Now I work with histologists all the time, among other kinds of laboratorians, and there are many who change their blades like 10 times a shift. They're just cut and cut, and cut and that's their job. And they and, because they're working so fast and they're under a productivity crunch, hey, we got to cut so many blocks per night. You know they're not taking the time to slowly, they're just saying, hey, I'm going to be careful around the blades. And I talk to histologists who tell me productivity is more important than safety. So we still continue to see blade cuts in different areas like that. But those are the kinds of safety stand-downs that's just one example that I've been involved with. But was it effective? A few years later I had to do another one. Is that because of staff turnover? Maybe in part, but I'm not sure how effective that process was.
Speaker 2:Well, you know, it's funny because I, when we started talking about safety stand-downs, you know what I was envisioning and what I've seen sometimes can produce, you know, a negative result among the staff. They're scared about reporting additional incidents because they don't want another safety stand-down. So I think, if an organization actually builds it into his culture because what I heard you say, dan, just recently is like, well, I had to do another one in another year. So I'm trying to think in my mind, you know, because we want to spend about 15 minutes with our listeners on each topic and we always are open for emails, please, if you have anything you want us to talk about, send it to us. But, dan, what if we came up with, like, when should a safety stand-down occur? And I came up with a list as you were talking, I tried to come up with an acronym STAND. I was like Dan when should.
Speaker 2:And I got everything figured out except for a, d, so here we go. This is what I'm thinking. You tell me what your thoughts are. First and foremost, I think safety stand-down should be done randomly every year, maybe once or twice a year where you just intentionally pause, not because of incidents, not because of accidents.
Speaker 2:But you actually just pause and say you know what? We're just going to stop real fast in this moment and we're going to reflect on how we're doing things and whether or not we can improve safety. What do you think about that first one?
Speaker 1:I like that. I actually been involved with an organization that did that. They called it the triple R rare refresh, retrain, and every once in a while they did it more than once or twice a year, maybe monthly, and they put out information about safety. Oh, by the way, just as a reminder, here you go. This doesn't happen that often, but you need to think about it. Let's refresh you on that. And retrain.
Speaker 2:All right, yeah, I like it. So that's the S. The T is, when we identify a trend, it's not a good trend. Maybe a trend of close calls, maybe also to reportable incidents, can include sometimes when we're using instruments and we get a weird result, dan, like, okay, obviously this is not. Either the machine is not functioning right or we didn't do something right. But what if we see trends and I consider a trend like three or more is what I'm looking at where we have three or more in a very tight period of time, we start seeing a trend that's causing some concern.
Speaker 1:Makes sense. What do you think? I like it All right.
Speaker 2:So that trend is good for T, all right. What about accident? Following an accident? What do you think?
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, depending on them, Depending on the type of accident, but most accidents that would be reported would be a safety issue, I'm sure. Yes.
Speaker 2:Yes, and a stand down doesn't have to be something that's long. It could be Again that that may be something that we want to talk a little bit about, like, what do we do during a stand down? Dan, that may be another podcast, but yeah, and we should write that down because I think that may be a good idea. All right, I've got my in here. We go whenever we're gonna do anything new.
Speaker 1:Ah, yes, let's do, let's yeah, what do you think? A new process, yep.
Speaker 2:Yep yeah, I mean we agree, pause and like, look at the new process, get some perspectives and and make sure that everybody's comfortable doing it now. Unfortunately, dan, I have not been able to come up with a D.
Speaker 1:I have your D Sean. I have your D, what you got you ready, yeah so, stan, that's all about figuring out when to do it. The D just means deploy. Deploy that safety stand down.
Speaker 2:All right, we, yeah, we can or have a good plan yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, if you have an ST or a or an N, you need a D oh.
Speaker 2:I like that. Yeah, I know this is.
Speaker 1:This is a presentation in the works. Folks, you're listening to us come up with our own presentation.
Speaker 2:I think, dan, I think we're gonna do that quite a bit and then I think that's the come. So all right, so just so, just to recap, when should we have a stand down? If you have, obviously should be strict, just part of your overall safety program. If you see a trend, three or more things that that are causing you to be concerned in a very short period of time, if you have any accidents, if you're gonna start anything new and, of course, if you have any of those things, what should you do? Last Dan?
Speaker 1:You should deploy that safety stand. There you go. I agree, awesome. All right, sean. I I knew this was gonna be a lot to talk about today. When I started to write blogs and other things about safety stand downs, it always took me like two or three Different blogs to finish it, because there's just so much to talk about. And that's okay. We will probably talk about it again and when we when you see us deploy our stand acronym out there They'll be more to come, I'm sure. So I'm excited about it. It was great to talk about it, and Next time we'll be talking to you about another safety issue. I'm sure that comes up in the laboratory.
Speaker 1:Sean thanks very much.
Speaker 2:Thank you.
Speaker 1:We will talk to you all next time.
Speaker 2:We are the lab safety gurus, dance gun Jill and Sean Kaufman.
Speaker 1:Thank you for letting us do lab safety together.