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
The Lifesaving Guide to Responding to a Person Down in the Laboratory
Are you equipped to face a 'man down' scenario in your lab? Ensuring your team's safety is paramount, and that's why we, Dan Scungio and Sean Kaufman, are here to share essential strategies and firsthand accounts for navigating these high-stress situations. Our latest episode of the Lab Safety Gurus Podcast is a deep dive into the critical response protocols needed when seconds count. With stories pulled from our own experiences, including a harrowing tale from a highly infectious disease unit in Atlanta, we provide a stark look at the dangers of unpreparedness and the life-saving power of immediate, informed action.
We lay out the must-have tools for every lab's emergency kit, from mechanical creepers to AEDs and stop-the-bleed kits, while driving home the importance of comprehensive safety training for all personnel. You'll gain practical advice on how to maintain a state of readiness, and why something as simple as a zip-tied first aid kit can foster accountability and ensure prompt, proper care. This isn't just about ticking boxes for compliance; it's about instilling a culture of respect and preparedness that extends to every member of your lab—because when it comes to lab safety, every detail matters, and every second counts. Join us for a conversation that could very well change how you think about emergency response and lab safety.
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.
Speaker 1:Alright, hello everybody. Hope everybody's doing fine. I have something on my mind today, Sean, that I want to talk about. What do you got, Dan? What's on my mind today, Sean, that I want to talk about?
Speaker 2:What do you got, Dan? What's on your mind today?
Speaker 1:You know, a long time ago maybe two or three years ago, actually, it was probably longer ago than that I went to some special training at this training center in Atlanta, georgia, and I was, you know, I had been a lab safety officer for a while and one of the things that we had to learn about in our organization was, you know, how to handle situations in a highly infectious disease unit. One of our hospitals was going to be an assessment hospital for Ebola and there are certain funds that come with that, but there's also certain training and things that you have to have with that. And so I go to this training center and all of a sudden the trainer brings this information that he's about to go over and he's got us, you know, donning and doffing in this special PPE and all of a sudden the situation comes up hey, what if somebody goes down? What if there's a man down in this laboratory? What are you going to do? And that trainer, sean, was you.
Speaker 2:I was like wait this sounds familiar.
Speaker 1:This sounds familiar and all of a sudden, there's this dolly I don't know what you call it a dolly that you use to like roll under a car to fix the engine, or change the oil.
Speaker 2:A mechanical creeper is what it's called a mechanical creeper Is that the official name of it? Believe it or not, it has a name.
Speaker 1:And so we were able to put the person onto the creeper and get them rolled out of the BSL-3 lab or BSL-4, whatever we were dealing with that day. It wasn't really in that situation, it was a training lab and figure out how to do that, and I think of this all the time. So as a lab safety officer, I have seen some horrendous responses to employee down or man down, and I think people aren't always as prepared as they need to be for such a situation, and so we're still learning. Thanks to your training. We're still putting together our response for our HIDU laboratory.
Speaker 1:But we also have tons of clinical laboratories where I work, and I've seen situations. I'll give you a couple examples. We had an employee who felt weak all of a sudden and could no longer stand up, and so she sort of collapsed against a wall and sat down on the floor in the laboratory in her PPE, and the immediate response from the co-workers was we need to get this girl some orange juice. And so they instead of calling for some kind of help because you know, in a hospital setting you have the ability to call for help- yes.
Speaker 1:And so, instead of doing that, they ran to the cafeteria and brought some orange juice into the laboratory and let her drink it there on the floor and let her make the decision the patient as to whether or not she needed any kind of medical help. And you know, some people just don't want that, they don't want to go to the emergency room, they don't want to make a big deal out of something. It's just their. Maybe it's their nature, maybe it's happened to them before and they're not worried about it. But you know, as a safety officer, I'm always training my people. You will call for help, you'll get a response and that person, if they've gone down, they're going to the emergency department for treatment of some sort, even if the emergency department just tells them hey, you are a-okay now, I have to say back in 2004, so we're 20 years ago we were doing our first training in the BSL-4 at Emory, in the mock training lab, and we were doing a scenario like this.
Speaker 2:We had a breathing bag and basically, as I was watching it, it was really not a very good response and I thought we need to do better and and so we convened a panel of emergency room docs, firefighters and police officers and not police officers, firefighters and EMS personnel and we posed the challenge to them in high containment, because we realized we were just biosafety professionals, we're not medical professionals. We posed the challenge, we showed them the lab environment, we talked about what we were working with and we posed the challenge what would you want us to do if somebody went down in the lab? And we developed a policy? It's published. Actually, if you just go to Google and you type in the alert training program, emory University, you'll see a publication from the APSA journal. It's actually published, it's available. We've trained thousands of people on it. But let me I'll go through kind of the first thing I would do. If somebody goes down in a lab, the very first thing that you do is you don't approach them, dan, why? Why would you not approach them Dan?
Speaker 1:Are we talking about in a highly infectious disease? No, we could say in any lab.
Speaker 2:Let's just say any lab. If someone goes down in a lab environment, the first step is not to approach them. Why?
Speaker 1:So my head goes to maybe they're being electrocuted, okay, or there's something in the area that made them go down and if you go over there, it may make you go down as well Strong fumes or something.
Speaker 2:I am so happy that it seems that retention of the training program has worked. That's the answer, dan, I'm looking for. I never want to criticize people that have always tried to help people and injured, but if those individuals had gone and gotten orange juice and walked over to the person without calling for help, it could have been a chemical, it could have been electricity whatever was putting that person on the ground could have put those other people on the ground, and then you've got nobody outside of the lab knowing there's a problem. The very, very first thing you do when you see someone going down is you call out of the lab, knowing there's a problem. The very, very first thing you do when you see someone going down is you call out of the lab and you make sure that anyone and everyone outside the lab knows you're having a laboratory emergency.
Speaker 2:That's the very first thing that you do, and we learned that that was something we weren't doing, because if you're out in the open and there's lots of people around, you've got a lot of air, there's a lot of people around, you can yell, call 911. You can actually point to somebody I think that's the protocol Point to someone and say call 911. And then you can go over and assess somebody. But when you're in a confined space, it doesn't have to be high containment. When you're in a confined laboratory environment, it's a confined space. You want to make sure if someone goes down, the first thing you do is call out.
Speaker 1:That's the start. Yeah, I can't agree more. It frightens me a little bit how some people behave in those situations, and it's not a criticism. Not everybody responds well to an emergency situation. Absolutely. It's human nature, absolutely Not everybody responds well to an emergency situation.
Speaker 2:Absolutely, it's human nature.
Speaker 1:Absolutely. I find that in a crisis situation, I need to pause for a second, for a few seconds, and gather my wits. That's just how I am, but there are other people who jump right to it. Let's get right to it, and I know people are different, but I've also seen some responses that you know. I just want people, I just want listeners, to think about the steps you take, because there are other situations that can happen too. Right, If somebody falls or somebody hits their head and they fall to the ground and you've assessed the situation, you know there isn't a fume or electricity or whatever it is that could have taken them down. You know the reason for it and maybe the person's awake and they say, okay, I feel like I could use an evaluation. Awake. And they say, okay, I feel like I could use an evaluation.
Speaker 1:I have seen situations where lab people will put their co-workers in a task chair and roll them down to the emergency department, which is very dangerous, especially to somebody who may be weak or may collapse again. We're not talking about a wheelchair, we're just. You know, let's grab the first chair we can find and roll them. So here's a chair, an office chair, with no arms on it and they're just kind of rolling the person down the hallway, Things like that. That's not the safe way to get the employee to where they need to go and you have to consider their safety all the way until they get to the point of treatment. If they need treatment, and nine times out of ten if they're falling out in the laboratory, they probably need some sort of treatment.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I would agree with that.
Speaker 1:So let's say, you know, I've made an assessment. Sean and this person passed out. They're in a small sort of ante room off the histology area and I saw them fall through the glass door and I think that they've spilled like five gallons of formalin in the room and they've been overcome.
Speaker 2:What do I do? Well, I mean again after you've notified individuals of the situation, I would do anything we could to then help. One of the things that we have to realize is EMS. When they respond, it may take some time. Dan, just off the top of your head, I'm wondering do you know in the United States about how many sudden cardiac arrests occur in the United States every year?
Speaker 1:Oh gosh, I have no idea.
Speaker 2:There are over 350,000 out of hospital. Wow, 350,000 out of hospital sudden cardiac arrests. Now, remember that panel. I told you we convened. Yeah, they said that there will be people that pass out because of blood sugar issues. Maybe pregnant women will pass out because of blood sugar issues. Maybe pregnant women will pass out because of blood sugar issues which, by the way, in the years I've been doing this, we've heard about this. People may have seizures. They may be over. You know, something may happen electrical or something may happen from a chemical standpoint but the panel recommended that we prepare for sudden cardiac arrest, and what we mean by that is that every lab that we worked in we would recommend having an AED, because really, only 10% of people that have that sudden cardiac arrest in the United States live because of lack of access to AEDs and the speed at which an AED would need to be hooked up.
Speaker 2:But let me, I'm going sidetracked. Let me get back to the point. Ems is not going to respond very quickly, unless, of course, you're at a hospital, so you may have to wait. But your key here is that one of the golden principles that emergency medical responders are taught is I'm not going to put myself at an increased risk when trying to attend to a patient. So they've got to assess their environment. So the next thing I would ask is is the environment in which the person has gone unconscious a safe environment for EMS to enter? And if the answer is no, then your job as a lab is to prepare to move somebody to a place where EMS can come in, and that may be a common quarter. That's why we use the creeper.
Speaker 2:The creeper is a you know, it's a $30 solution where you can put half of a body on it and literally wheel the person out of tight spaces. You remember that. Of course, that training aspect yes, that's why we use the creeper. It's much safer than a chair and trying to lift. You know, by the way, if you're lifting a body that's unconscious onto a chair, it's not going to go very well for you. It isn't going to happen.
Speaker 2:So to me, you know again, I worry about containment. Now, as you know, I work at the high level containment environments, and so we're also focused not only on somebody's surviving, but we also need to ensure containment, because we've made promises to not only staff but to people outside of the laboratory that we're going to do everything we can to make sure what we work with stays where we work with it. So there are multiple issues Typically in a diagnostic lab. I don't think you're going to run into worrying about massive containment breaches, but it could happen to worrying about massive containment breaches, but it could happen. But in reality I think that you just have to make sure that the environment in which the person is unconscious is a place that EMS is going to come into. And if it can't, and if they won't, then you're going to have to move the body outside of the lab, so EMS will handle them outside the laboratory.
Speaker 1:Yeah, absolutely, and you said it was like a sidebar, but really this is another key point I would want listeners to understand about about being in the laboratory and people having something like a heart attack or anything like that. You should have an aed nearby. If you're in a you know medical facility, chances are there are those devices around, but if you're in a standalone or research-type laboratory, make sure you've got a device like an AED Maybe a stop-the-bleed kit, something like that as well and a first aid kit. If you're part of a hospital, you don't need to have a first aid kit OSHA doesn't require it but certainly if you're in a standalone facility, you do need something like that. You want to make sure it's stocked, that things aren't expired and that you're keeping it in a clean area. Don't keep your burn lotions and band-aids in the you know dirty drawer in the laboratory either. Keep it in a clean area for when you need it and make sure, if you have those things, that people are trained to use them.
Speaker 1:Aeds are great. A lot of them give you step-by-step instructions on how to use them, but the first time you have to use one, you're going to be scared to death. I know I would be. I've never had to, but I hope never to have to. But they're there for a reason.
Speaker 2:Listen to how many sudden heart attacks there are like that, dan, I know because we're running out of time, we maybe need to do a part two on this one. But let me draw something. You said first aid kit. Do me a favor If you're going to do a first aid kit, make sure that you have a zip tie on it that closes it. And let me explain why, explain why.
Speaker 2:I have found in the years where first aid kits are in labs that people will treat cuts and sticks with the first aid kit inside the laboratory and not tell people, and so I don't like that. So please don't lay Band-Aids around or anything like that, because if you get a cut or a stick, number one it should be reported, but number two, it should be treated outside of the lab by somebody who can assess your risk and whether or not something needs to be prophylactically offered. So, for example, in a lab, like in a hospital, dan, if it's hiv, you need to be on prophylactic countermeasures within 45 minutes. So, yeah, so, yeah, so. So you really want people to be reporting cut sticks as soon as possible and not just self-treating.
Speaker 1:Yeah, in the clinical setting, if you're in a hospital, I recommend people not to have first aid kits. For exactly that reason, I want them to come to somebody when there's an injury in the laboratory, the laboratory. And if you do have one yes, it need the it should be zip tied or put in the manager's desk so that nobody can get to it without letting the manager know so that the issue's been escalated yeah, perfect, yeah, yeah treat, treat.
Speaker 1:Treat your co-workers and your, your staff with respect by being ready for these things that can happen. This is uh. We're all human beings. We all have failable bodies and something could go wrong at any time, then we need to be prepared for it in the laboratory.
Speaker 2:We are the lab safety gurus Dan Scungio and Sean Kaufman.
Speaker 1:Thank you for letting us do lab safety together.