During your lab’s next EH&S survey visit, you will be asked a new question from the survey checklist if PPE is adequately available for everyone. The desired response to this question is a confident “Yes!”
What is a sit-stand workstation?
A sit-stand workstation is one that allows the user to alternate between sitting and standing by being able to lower or raise the work surface.
Sitting vs. standing, which one is better?
Annual University of Washington Ceremony
April 24, 2019, 11:30am
University of Washington, Seattle Campus, HUB North Ballroom (second floor of Husky Union Building)
This special ceremony will raise awareness about how we can strengthen our commitment to make jobs safer and save lives in Washington state. This ceremony will honor Washington state workers who lost their lives in 2018.
As of April 2019, the online radiation safety training looks very different. The new training is interactive, features quizzes and activities along the way, and contains voiceovers by our very own Radiation Safety staff.
Do you assess the risk in your lab work? It is important to conduct a risk assessment whenever a new experiment, procedure or project is developed in your lab. A risk assessment focuses on hazard identification at each step or task level, and can provide essential information for enhancing safety practices, establishing proper procedures, and ensuring all lab members are properly trained. EH&S’s new Lab R.A.T. (Laboratory Risk Assessment Tool) can be used to help with gathering the information you need.
With the closure of Consolidated Laundry, the UW is moving to a new vendor for lab coat cleaning. UW Procurement Services is assisting with the transition to an alternate laundry provider (MediCleanse) for laboratories and academic spaces on campus.
Departments that relied on Consolidated Laundry for lab coat cleaning should complete an online survey to provide UW Procurement Services with details about the quantity, items and services needed.
Environmental Health & Safety is beginning a project to migrate online training content, course registrations, and training records to a learning management system (LMS) called Bridge. This migration is in an effort to streamline our training management processes and deliver more current and reliable on-line EH&S training content. Bridge will ultimately provide a single registration process for both on-line and instructor-led (classroom) courses and be a single source for all EH&S training records.
The migration to Bridge will happen in three phases:
The 2018 Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) 300A summaries of work-related injuries and illnesses are now posted on the Environmental Health and Safety (EH&S) website, along with summaries for previous years. The summaries are required to be posted from February 1, 2019 through April 30, 2019 in a location where employees can easily see them such as on a department’s safety bulletin board or in a break room.
The 2019 edition of the UW Biosafety Manual is here! The most significant changes include:
A list of changes is included in the log of changes.
Human source materials, including human cell lines, blood, tissues and other potentially infectious materials (OPIM) are commonly used biohazards in UW research labs. Potentially infectious human materials can contain bloodborne pathogens (BBP) such as human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) and hepatitis B and C viruses.
