Safety Climate Considerations in the Development of a Management System for Safety, Environment, and Process Control in Engineering laboratories at the National University of Ireland, Galway

The College of Engineering and Informatics of NUI, Galway has recently moved into its new engineering building. Management wishes to improve the state of health, safety and quality issues within the College laboratories. For that reason a bona fide laboratory safety management system was required. This project firstly surveyed the attitudes to health and safety levels within engineering laboratories by conducting a safety climate questionnaire and interviews and developed a laboratory safety checklist. The safety climate questionnaire was adapted from one that was created by a joint industry and UK Health and Safety Executive research project on the assessment of safety culture in offshore environments (HSE 1999). Our research also resulted in the development of the checklist mentioned above, and a standard operating procedure template that also focuses on environment and process procedure and recommendations to create databases of equipment, chemicals, vaccinations and safety training. All of these if taken together will give management the information they need to bring the safety, process procedures and environment to an acceptable level within the College.