Identifying and Evaluating Hazards in Research Laboratories

4. Unconscious competence: You are very knowledgeable and experienced regarding thesubject at hand.Involving multiple people in a review (students, laboratory workers with varying experiences,peers, and support staff) is a good defense against unconscious incompetence.Regardless of education level or experience with the hazard evaluation techniques, it is easy to beunaware of hazards with materials, equipment, and processes. When hazard evaluation is a new oremerging concept to an organization, it can be prudent to assume people are at the unconsciousincompetence stage and default to proceeding carefully with small scale, and perhaps withadditional controls such as enhanced protective clothing.Additional points to consider:• Don’t expect perfection the first time a hazard evaluation technique is used, but expectimprovement. This is a learning process.• Use walk-throughs of the space where the research will be done, mock-ups, andobservations of similar processes to help identify hazards. Do not just conduct the reviewon paper.• Discuss previous accidents and near-misses.• Maintain open lines of communication – talk about safety in research meetings.• Publish completed hazard evaluations so that others can use them as examples.6. CHANGE CONTROLIt can be said that research is synonymous with change. In a research environment, the results ofevery experiment, the latest publication of a peer or something as simple as the thought you hadover breakfast or a conversation in the hall can cause a researcher to modify what they plan to dowhen they enter their lab on any day. Unfortunately, the cause of many accidents and injuries canbe traced back to unrecognized changes in work scope or hazards. Fundamentally, when the workto be performed changes, that change must be evaluated against the current hazards analysis todetermine if the hazards analysis continues to be sufficient. If this is not done, the researcher couldbegin the task not fully armed with the knowledge and mitigations to do the work safely.6.1. Recognizing ChangeWhile we all recognize change is ever-present in research, it can also be extremely difficult torecognize, especially if the change is subtle. As one becomes more accustomed to performinghazard evaluations and it becomes a habit or integral part of the way to plan an activity, the types ofchanges that could impact the fidelity of an analysis become more obvious. Until then, the followingexamples are provided for consideration in recognizing potential important changes:• Same basic synthesis, but changing the reactant to a compound with an additionalfunctional group.19