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
From Reporting to Action: Closing the Loop on Laboratory Safety Incidents
Safety reporting in laboratories isn't just about checking boxes—it's about creating fundamental change that protects everyone. In this candid conversation, Dan Scungio and Sean Kaufman tackle the uncomfortable reality that many lab professionals face: reporting systems exist, but fear of punishment keeps critical safety information hidden.
What happens when a laboratory culture punishes those who speak up about safety concerns? The consequences extend far beyond incident rates. As Dan shares from his experiences as a safety officer, environments where staff fear retribution for reporting incidents create dangerous ripple effects that impact quality assurance and patient care. The hosts explore how power dynamics, from pathologists who ignore safety protocols to managers who punish those who report problems, create barriers to transparent safety cultures.
The critical difference between effective and ineffective reporting systems lies not in collecting data, but in what happens afterward. Sean and Dan discuss practical frameworks for closing the feedback loop, including the "stop, start, keep" model that empowers laboratory staff to identify and implement meaningful changes. True laboratory safety requires moving beyond assigning blame to sharing safety stories openly, ensuring that lessons learned become permanent improvements rather than lessons ignored. By fostering environments where reporting leads to action rather than punishment, laboratories can transform their safety culture from one of fear to one of collective responsibility and continuous improvement.
Have you experienced barriers to reporting safety concerns in your laboratory? Share your experiences and join the conversation about creating psychologically safe reporting environments.
Welcome to the Lab Safety Gurus podcast. I'm Dan.
Speaker 2:Scungio and I'm Sean Coffman, and together we're providing safety insights for those working in laboratory settings, doing safety together. Well, welcome back, dan, and I can't believe we're doing this again very, very soon To find times on our schedule. That's quite impressive. So welcome back to the show, dan. How have you been?
Speaker 1:I've been doing OK, sean. It's been busy, but I think it's important that we do find the time to have these discussions and, honestly, on my end at least people are listening, they're asking questions, they're saying, hey, we're liking these conversations with Dan and Sean, but, more importantly, I'm liking them.
Speaker 2:I am too, Dan. It's always fun to talk with you. I'm not not only consider you a colleague, but I also consider you a dear friend and and I sure do appreciate the opportunity to sit down with you and talk about lab issues and hopefully influence or inspire people out there who are listening. And today it's my turn actually to facilitate. So we're going to actually talk a little bit about incident and accident and kind of reporting aspects and give some strategies or at least some thoughts on what we can do. So I want to start off first by just asking you a basic question, Dan. You know, what do you think or why do you think it's so important to report incidents and accidents? And actually even I want to even tie this to like clinical results of tests that seem abnormal. You know what I'm saying. Like you get something, it's just like that is not what I was expecting, and why would that also be something you may want to consider reporting?
Speaker 1:Because so that's, that's a great question, and so I've been preaching as a safety officer for years.
Speaker 1:I don't care if you get a paper cut when you're in the laboratory, I want you to report every single thing that happens. But but you, one of the things you need to have if you're safety-minded is a questioning attitude, and so just kind of what you were just talking about. When you question some results or something that's a little out of the ordinary, you need to sort of stop, think, act, review, do those kinds of things. But that's also true with safety. And when you can get your lab culture to a point where the people are reporting near misses instead of just the incidents incidents should be a no-brainer, they should be reported. But when you can get to the point where they're seeing near misses, now they've got that questioning attitude and now your safety culture is there, because not only are they looking out for safety things, but they're transparent and they're in a culture where it's okay to talk about it and their leadership's okay talking about it, because that does not happen everywhere.
Speaker 2:Well, there's a lot of things you know. Let's, let's we'll kind of prime the the environment here. Let's, let's say we're, we're looking at this and and you're asking people to report incidents and accidents and near misses and even weird results. Now, that typically means that somebody may have to admit that they may have messed up, they may have made a mistake. Now, if I'm paying for my daughter's college education, which I am, and I've got a mortgage that I've got to pay, and you know, with the political climate right now, the jobs well, it may be very hard to find one right now. Why would I report if I know that I'm going to get in trouble and could get fired? Is that a barrier to reporting incidents, accidents and near misses?
Speaker 1:Absolutely a barrier to reporting and that's not the kind of culture we want. I was doing a CAP inspection so we do inspections of other labs and I was finding things, doing the safety part of the checklist and finding some things, and the person who I was inspecting the safety officer of that other system. She was getting quite upset with me and so she took me into a separate room after a while and I said look. I said do you are the things that I'm finding in your audit? Are they a problem? Do you disagree with what I'm seeing and am I writing anything? That's not true. And she said no and she just was very quiet and I said are you going to get in trouble because of the results of this, this audit today? Uh, if there are things on it. She said yes, but she couldn't say it out loud, she couldn't say it in public. Uh, and it it didn't change what I had to do, but I just thought how awful to work in that environment where a safety event means punishment or a safety write-up means punishment. I I can't even imagine. You know, I've worked in different environments but and they haven't all been good, but to get in trouble for reporting something weird. So if you're going to do that with safety and you get in trouble for reporting something that's off, what about quality? You touched on it already, right? So why am I going to report that this QC is a problem or that this needs recalibration because these results aren't looking good? But I'm not going to say anything because I might get in trouble. Now you're affecting patient results, now you're affecting patient care.
Speaker 1:That is a terrible, terrible environment to be in and I hope there aren't too many labs where that's the case.
Speaker 1:In some cultures and other parts of the world we have power distance. We have that a little bit in the United States, in some places too where, for instance, like a co-pilot doesn't dare say anything to the pilot because the pilot's just that much more important. And so if my pathologist walks in the lab and I notice he doesn't have gloves on and he's starting to do some gross sectioning or something, do I dare say something? Or is he going to use that power distance against me? Don't you talk to me? I'm a pathologist and you're just a lowly lab scientist. So there's all kinds of things in a lab culture, in an environment, that can create those barriers to reporting which I have been working at chipping away at for years for all these people who work in these labs, because people do reach out, as you know. They'll reach out to us and they'll talk about some of these problems and I wish I could go in and fix those kinds of problems because it's a terrible barrier to live with.
Speaker 2:No, it is 100%, and that's you know. That's one of the things that I want to keep talking about here, because so many organizations will have a plan for reporting incidents, accidents, near misses and even QA issues, as you mentioned, dan. But the problem is is that just having a plan does not produce an outcome If the culture is not psychologically safe, if you do not prime the culture and remind people that what matters here the most is not who's at fault, but what's the issue, not who's the issue. What's the issue so that we can fix the what and protect all the who's? The reality is is that if you don't have a culture that promotes psychological safety, then you, even though you may have an incident reporting plan, people are not going to use it.
Speaker 2:And that brings me to my next question, because this is the big one, dan. This is it right? All right, we've got this incident accident, you know, near miss QA reporting system, right? So when somebody does that they report an incident accident near miss QA reporting system, where does that? They report an incident accident near miss QA reporting system? Where?
Speaker 1:does that typically go? It depends on the organization it does.
Speaker 2:But let's. Generically, what we're going to do is let me rephrase the question. Here we go. Let me rephrase the question Does anything happen afterwards?
Speaker 1:usually Usually there should be a response section to all reports. So if I have an incident report, it doesn't matter what the format is that I use. There should be a follow-up or a response section that is documented for every incident that occurs in the laboratory.
Speaker 2:Well, that's it. That's my point, right there. Hold on, hang on one sec, right. If you're in your guest room and you're changing the bed for a guest and you hit your shin on the edge of the bed and you yell and you hurt yourself, there is no doubt that probably everybody in the house is going to know that you hit your shin. But is there anything done to prevent future shin hitting?
Speaker 1:probably not in the household, because they're just going to say, well, you just weren't being, you were just not paying attention.
Speaker 2:And let's take that into the lab. Now, come on, let's be candid here. This is the one. The issue that I have is, I feel kind of and unfortunately, my background's in public health and sexual health is an issue, so I'm going to bring that up. Not that it has anything to do with this, but I'm going to use an analogy.
Speaker 2:I found many, many college students when I worked as a sexual health counselor as my first job. I found many college students came to college ill-prepared to deal with sex. Very ill-prepared because they lived in a household where their parents believed it was the school's job to teach them about sex and the school believed that it was a parent's job to teach them about sex. And so you basically had a child that never learned about sex because, well, quite honestly, nobody ever taught him.
Speaker 2:And here's the issue. This is the biggest issue I have. We teach people in labs to report incidents, accidents, near misses and even QA issues, but do we ever empower them issues? But do we ever empower them them as an individual, as a collective group to make a change as a result of that incident accident or numerous, or do we simply put that on the safety department or whoever receives the incident report, we actually make it that we almost in essence, I believe today we give scientists the ability to throw their hands up in the air. Go well, it's no longer my issue. I've reported. What are your thoughts on?
Speaker 1:that. So I like a different kind of reporting system and I try to do that in the labs where I work. So when we have an incident that's reported it goes into the electronic reporting system, employee health and all of that. And then it could end there and in fact even on the employee health report that's electronic, it says what could the employee do to make sure that this doesn't happen again, or what can the manager do to make sure. And you can type in whatever you want and nobody ever looks at it.
Speaker 1:But on the laboratory side we have the four column grid what happened, where it happened, a detailed description of it, what you would do to prevent it is column three. And column four is who went back to the employee and talked to the employee about methods or who made the changes, the physical changes, whatever needed to be done to make sure this doesn't happen again, so that the loop is at least closed. So does that mean in my organization that repeat accidents don't happen? No, it doesn't mean that. But it does mean that somebody has gone back and followed up with the individual who hit their shin on the bed and talked to them about why it happened and gave them methods of preventing a reoccurrence of the same incident. But it may and it may not. It may be behavioral, it might be physical. Maybe we need a new chair. They cut themselves on the arm of the chair, something like that, because we need a door handle, whatever, and we, and so the follow-up, is we fixed by the way? So you have to close the loop for sure.
Speaker 2:No, I like that. And can I suggest another closing of the loop, which I love because your model gets to what I'm going and where I was going as well. I have for many years used the stop, start, keep model and I love it. Oh, I absolutely love it. I love it in evaluating what we could do differently in labs. I love it in evaluating how I'm doing as a teacher. I even use it as how am I doing as a parent? I even ask my kids what do you want me to stop doing that I'm currently doing? What do you want me to start doing that I'm not doing? And what do you want me to keep doing that I am doing? It's a wonderful, wonderful tool.
Speaker 2:But imagine if we included that in our incident accident, included that in our incident accident qa reporting. What, based on what this incident do you want to stop doing that you were doing? What do you want to start doing that you weren't doing? And what do you want to keep doing that you were doing? And what if we actually uh, um, uh, promoted that, because it's really what you were talking about. What if we actually actually promoted that type of closing of the loop where we empower scientists, the lab staff to identify new things. They would start doing old things. They would stop doing and, and and. What they would keep doing that they currently are doing Again. I don't know what are your thoughts on that, dan. And what they would keep doing that they currently are doing Again. I don't know what are your thoughts on that, dan.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I like that. It makes me think because I say this often that 80% of our incidents are kind of like people not paying attention. So I just wonder how many times people would write not paying attention. So I just wonder how many times people would write stop daydreaming or stop not thinking about what I'm doing, start focusing on what I'm doing. But how many times is a person going to say that before it actually has meaning to the change they're really going to make?
Speaker 2:Well, and that's another deal too, because when we do a root cause analysis, well, and that's another deal too, because when we do a root cause analysis, we really really have to take the root cause analysis seriously. We cannot and it's important, we really truly can't allow somebody to say I wasn't concentrating. That's not a reason. It's not a reason, it really is and it's very. I think it's very frustrating too. We're trying to get down to really what's going on. But my point in all this and I know we've got it We've got to come to a wrap here because we're on our last minute here. But here's my point Just like that child who doesn't have anybody educating them.
Speaker 2:The saddest part for me is that the responsibility of reporting incidents, accidents and near misses that responsibility is is only part one. The reporting is part one of that. The making a change in the environment is part two, because the difference between a lesson learned and a lesson ignored is change. And if you have an incident, accident, accident, near miss or a QA issue and all you're doing is reporting it, but you're not changing anything, that's a lesson ignored, not a lesson learned. Final words, dan, before we close out.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So this is where the transparency comes in and this is what's so key. I can have three people who cut their fingers on a cover slip because they were cleaning the counter and didn't notice it was there. Whatever, I better be talking about that in huddles, in meetings and with everybody, not just the people that occurred with and talking about. You don't just want to talk about methods of prevention with the people who had the accident, but with everybody else, because the consequences are real and you're trying to avoid the consequences going to anybody else. So that's where, to me, the most important thing is not just incident reporting, but telling those safety stories to everybody and getting the getting that information out there well, dan.
Speaker 2:As always, it is such a pleasure talking with you. Have a wonderful weekend and we'll continue to do this. I look forward to our future conversations. Looking forward to it, sean. We are the lab safety gurus, dan scungio and sean kaufman.
Speaker 1:Thank, you for letting us do lab safety together.