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.
Stay up-to-date with the latest trends and engaging debates surrounding lab safety by tuning in to every episode.
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The Lab Safety Gurus
Reimagining Lab Safety Training for Behavioral Impact
Tired of snoozing through the same old lab safety spiel? Buckle up, because lab safety gurus Dan Scungio and Sean Kaufman are here to shake up the status quo of blood-borne pathogen instruction. Get ready to transform your approach to lab safety as they lay out the raw truth behind the cookie-cutter compliance culture that's numbing the minds of lab professionals everywhere. By bringing our personal frustrations to the table, we illuminate the stark difference between rote policy reading and the dynamic impact of hands-on mentorship. This episode promises to engage, enlighten, and challenge the way you think about lab training, emphasizing the need for behavior modeling over documentation.
Lab safety isn't just about ticking boxes—it's about embodying the very practices that keep us safe. Venture with us into the heart of what it means to standardize laboratory procedures, especially when infectious diseases are in play. Dan and Sean tackle the delicate balance between individual liberty and the absolute must of following safety protocols. We dissect the unique challenges diverse research labs face, the pivotal role of steadfast mentorship, and the uncompromising enforcement of standard operating procedures. Remember, it's not just about the written SOPs; it's the direct mentorship that embodies and upholds these life-saving practices that ultimately creates a culture of safety. Join us for a fresh take on fostering consistent, safe behavior in the laboratory.
Welcome to the Lab Safety Gurus Podcast. I'm Dan Scungio.
Speaker 2:And I'm Sean Kaufman, and together we're providing safety insights for those working in laboratory settings, doing safety together. Alright, dan, how many times have you taken the OSHA blood-borne pathogen training? Oh, sean.
Speaker 1:Let's see how many years have I been a medical laboratory scientist, working in a hospital setting, forced to take the OSHA-mandated class every year, the computer-based training? It's over 30 years, probably over 30 times then.
Speaker 2:Are you excited when you get that notification that says Dan it's time for safety training.
Speaker 1:You know it's that time of year already. They've downloaded the new computer based trainings for the year. They're not new, they're the same ones as last year.
Speaker 2:Excitement is not a term I would use, not even close that the worst thing that can happen is you literally give people training that does not make them. It's just not exciting to them, it's beyond repetitive. At this point it's almost like an overkill. But the saddest part is that I find that when you give people training and it doesn't offer them much, their excitement and openness to trainings that could make a profound difference are certainly lowered and weakened as a result of that type of response. I don't know. Do you have any thoughts about that?
Speaker 1:Yeah, and that's just talking about like the mandatory training. But when you my experience in the laboratory setting for training, it's not any better, for even some of the hands-on. Nowadays most of the policies and procedures are electronic and when you first get into the laboratory, your first few days first maybe week even you sit down and you have to do your computer-based training and then you have to go read policies and procedures and that's how you start training. Now if you're an experienced laboratorian, you probably think, okay, this is the drill. I know it's the drill. I'll find out what this job's about in a couple weeks when I really start bench training. But if you're new to the career or it's your first job, that is the worst, worst thing you can do to somebody.
Speaker 2:Well, everything you've just said yeah, everything you've said just broke my heart. I'm sitting here thinking as a human being, the worst thing you can ever do and we talked about this in a previous podcast the worst thing you could ever do is have people read things during the first couple weeks of work.
Speaker 1:If they're going to do that let them stay home, let them read it from home. Right? When I talk to my managers who do that with their training, I kind of get the same answer Well, if I don't make them read all the policies and procedures now, they'll never do it. And I just got to get this part out of the way. And I don't have time to work with them this week, or I don't have enough staff to train them this week, so it's just easier to sit them at a desk.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's just so sad because you're literally defeating the greatest gift a human being has, which is replication of behavior, by simply watching. You don't teach people how to behave in a lab with policies. You teach people how to behave in a lab by modeling the behavior you're looking for. And the same goes with leadership. You don't teach leaders how to lead with a book. You teach leaders how to lead by being an example of a leader. And that's the most frustrating part. Dan, let me ask you this your opinion why do we even train? Now, be honest here. I mean seriously be honest here. Why do most people train yeah, why?
Speaker 1:Because when you come into a new setting, you don't know how to do anything without training.
Speaker 2:No, I love that, I love that, but come on, seriously think about it. Why does your organization train?
Speaker 1:Well, okay, if you're talking about my organization, we train laboratorians because it's required.
Speaker 2:Nope, so it's a CYA issue.
Speaker 1:It is, it's a check the box. Our accrediting organizations, that's right, our accrediting organizations. Not only do they say we must have training, but they say we must have a training procedure.
Speaker 2:Now why. This is the interesting part. This is the neat part. You ready, this is the cool part. Let's dive deep into this. Okay, why do you think people have to tell people to train?
Speaker 1:Why do you think people have to tell people to train? Because there have been workplaces who have just probably thrown their staff new staff onto the work area without any sort of training and there have been problems.
Speaker 2:Okay, so what you're saying is this is what I liken it to. If I had a child and I said to the child would you like to play video games or go to school? What do you think the child would say?
Speaker 1:Video games, all the way.
Speaker 2:And if you say to a scientist would you like to do science or would you like to do training, what do you think the scientist is going to say Science, yes. So obviously we're going to have to tell people they have to train. Okay, I get that. I get that, but this is. Let's dive deeper now, dan, tell me what you think the difference is between awareness, training and education.
Speaker 1:Hmm, so awareness is that something exists, a danger exists, a function or a process exists. Education is something you should come with already before you. If I'm going to work in a laboratory, I should have some sort of laboratory education so that I have the background to know what they're talking about when they start talking about these things that are going on in this workplace, and then training should be specific to that workplace. I might have learned what a Trinder's reaction is for glucose in chemistry class, but this is the analyzer I'm going to learn to use so that I can run a glucose with that Tringer's reaction.
Speaker 1:This is something I've never seen before. I like it Is that it? Yeah, it's close.
Speaker 2:I like it. I think we're on the same page. So for this podcast, let's define awareness, as I'm going to teach you about the risks and the benefits of what I'm going to ask you to do. The training is actually the behavior I'm going to actually get you to do it and the education is your experience plus your training, meaning you now are transitioning to an expert. You're not looking for how to perform when everything is perfect in the lab. That's what you would do when you train. You're actually a problem solver, a critical thinker. You have the experience and the training to put it together and be more of an expert in the laboratory environment. And it's really neat because Einstein has several quotes attributed to this.
Speaker 2:An education without training or an education without real life experience is a waste of both time and money. Rather, you get life experience first and then get educated so you can streamline it. And that analogy works when we look at, say, for example, swimming. If I try to increase your awareness about swimming before I actually give you put you in a pool to swim, it's a waste of time. Hence, reading protocols before you actually have somebody do the behavior waste of time. It may make them feel comfortable, but it's not going to necessarily generate any more behavior than if you didn't give them that. But the reality is that when somebody gets comfortable with the water, it's then that I can coach them on how to master swimming. If I try to coach them on how to master swimming before they even learn how to swim, it's again a waste of time and resources.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's not going to work.
Speaker 2:But let's get back to this now. If we define awareness, training and education, we separate the three. Okay, and we separate the three, then the goal of training is to ensure that what we expect of a staff member, the staff member is actually capable of doing. So, meaning, the goal of training is to teach them the actual behaviors, right?
Speaker 1:Yeah, makes sense.
Speaker 2:And standard operating procedures are really not SOPs. They're standard operating behaviors and unfortunately the acronym SOB has already been taken. So I can't, I can't, I can't have to wait on that one. But if we're trying to teach them to to practice standardized behaviors, that means that we're going to have to train them. So, dan, in your experience, what has been some training strategies that you've implemented to get consistency of behavior among your staff?
Speaker 1:For me, when I do training, it's about repetition, a lot of repetition. So if I'm training somebody who's new to the blood bank, for example and I haven't done this in a few years since I've been in safety, but I've managed it a couple of times for sure I don't want somebody just to perform one blood type and antibody screen before you know they're set loose on the world taking care of patients. I want to teach them, show them how it's done, and then I want them doing it, whatever that is, if it's the automated version or the manual version and repeating that until there's a sense of security for both me as the trainer and them as the learner.
Speaker 2:No, so I love that. I'll tell you a true story here. You know I had traveled the world and watched how people behaved under the guidance of standard operating procedures and I was really very frustrated that we weren't seeing consistency of behaviors. I mean, we'd have all these unbelievable SOPs and no consistent behavioral practices. That's how valuable reading SOPs are. It doesn't work when you're dealing with a human being.
Speaker 1:It may program a computer't work when you're dealing with a human being.
Speaker 2:It may program a computer, but it doesn't work with a human being. And then I flew down to Honduras. I'll never forget it. It's the only time I've ever seen something like this, dan, where I get into a lab and I'm observing and there's about you know six or seven people in this lab and they are doing Dan. They're doing everything exactly the same way. I'm watching their procedures, I'm watching their donning and doffing of PPE, how they're cleaning biosafety cabinets, how they're working in the lab. It's like identical to one another. And I ask them to show me their SOPs. Because I was at that point. I you know, I was following the narrative that everything is based on an SOP and the reality, dan, blew me away. They had no SOPs. Dan, are you listening to me? No, they had no SOPs. None, none.
Speaker 2:I said how do you get your staff to behave consistently in the lab? And the supervisor said well, we bring them in when they're new and we say this is what we want you to do and we do it for them want us to do it, and they tell and they guide. So the person still is doing it, but the person's guiding them now and acting like a robot, and then they put that person in the chair and they say now show me, you can do it. And they do it. And then they say if you want a job, you'll do it exactly that way, otherwise you will not have a job anymore. And that is how they train their staff. And then they go through advanced training at a later date when they would do something.
Speaker 2:Something's wrong. So they have an incident in the lab, or they have a spill or whatever, and what happens is they use that moment to train people on how to respond to a spill or something unexpected. Hence education. So you have to be trained before you you get educated. But that is that is the place that I saw some of the most amazing results was in that laboratory, and it was not within the SOPs, it was within how individuals were trained.
Speaker 1:Do you feel like there was a measure of like how much did culture play into this? Because sort of I don't want to call it fear, but basically they're told if you want to keep your job here, you will do it this way.
Speaker 2:Well, I mean, dan, we've talked about this. This is where that accountability comes in. I'm not paying you to do what you want to do and I'm not paying you to do things your way. When you get paid to do work, you're being paid to do things the way the organization is asking you to do it, and I'm sorry, we really do have a culture and a society that's having a challenge here, where they're saying you know well, we can't really. You know we have to give people their personal autonomy. Listen, you can do that maybe somewhere else, but when we deal with infectious diseases and when we've made promises to the animals that feed us, the plants that feed us and the human beings that live outside of labs and the human beings that work inside labs, we can't afford to say do it your own way and do what you think is best. We have to do it in a very strategic and calculated way and we have to standardize those processes, and that's important. We can't allow people personal autonomy when working with infectious diseases.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's especially true in the laboratory. I think it should be true in every type of laboratory. I know that, like in research laboratories, when you have different PIs over the same laboratory and different students and grad students working in there, there's no good oversight, so that sort of repetition of behavior doesn't really happen. And then things happen like so many people are working in this department that we better you know we can't find the chemicals we need, so let's store them in alphabetical order. Ouch, you never do. That would not support what you described as the vision in that lab in Honduras, because they let people get away with I'll say a lot more. These days it seems like and behaviors are not consistent and some people you know they're going to try to get away with what they can get away with, and it's unfortunate, especially if it involves safety.
Speaker 2:Absolutely so. I mean again, just to wrap it up and I love our discussions, I think we've got to have more and more of these. Sometimes I wonder, dan, and I really do. I think the standard operating procedures are things that are written for organizations, written for leaders, written for regulators, but are they really written for staff? And there's no doubt that it's a strategic approach for staff to follow, but a staff member doesn't need an SOP. What a staff member needs is they need somebody to mentor the most appropriate behavior that the lab has decided to do that happens to be the SOP appropriate behavior that the lab has decided to do that happens to be the SOP. They need somebody not only to mentor them on that behavior but also hold them accountable for doing that behavior. And it all starts with training. We are the lab safety gurus, dan Scungio and Sean Kaufman.
Speaker 1:Thank you for letting us do lab safety together.