THE FOUR PRINCIPLES OF SAFETY

Preview This section discusses the importance of safety in the laboratory and introduces the four principles of safety and the student safety ethic. 

The greatest discovery of my generation is that a human being can alter his life by altering his attitudes of mind. 

William James, American physician, philosopher, and psychologist (1 842-1910)  

John was doing an experiment that required the use of dilute sulfuric acid. The instructor said that students should mix 1 part of concentrated sulfuric acid with 4 parts of water and that everyone should always add acid to water and not water to acid. John was not paying attention when the instructions were given and he added water to acid. There was a violent popping noise, the beaker became hot, a mist formed over the solution, and some solution splattered out onto his skin and his partner s skin. 

What lessons can be learned from this incident  

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FIGURE 1.1.1.2 The Four Principles of Safety. These four principles... 

FIGURE 1.1.1.2 The Four Principles of Safety. These four principles appear in nearly every section of this book. Memorizing, and using, these ideas whenever you think about safety issues will lead to incident-free laboratories. 

RADWASS has been organized in a hierarchical structure of four levels of safety documents. The top-level publication is a document of safety fundamentals which provides the basic safety objectives and fundamental principles to be followed in national waste management programmes. The lower levels include safety standards, safety guides, and safety practice documents. The series has been structured in a logical and clear manner to reflect the systems approach to waste management. 

The implementation of safety standards for nuclear installations, including those of the IAEA s Nuclear Safety Standards (NUSS) programme, has indicated a need for a separate publication to present the fundamental principles of nuclear safety. The Safety Series publications form a hierarchy of four levels with Safety Fundamentals at the highest level. Other levels correspond to Safety Standards, Safety Guides and Safety Practices. This Safety Fundamentals publication is intended not only for those people who are interested in the more detailed Safety Standards and Safety Guides, but also for those technical and political decision makers who may need a concise explanation of the fundamental safety principles. 

Renwick examined in detail the relative magnitude of toxicokinetic and toxicodynamic variations between and within species. Results suggested that toxicokinetic differences were generally greater than toxicodynamic differences. Thus, he proposed that the 10-fold overall UF be subdivided into factors of 4 for kinetics and 2.5 for dynamics. The International Programme on Chemical Safety (IPCS) has adopted the principles set forth by Renwick, but has suggested that while the UF for interspecies extrapolation be subdivided unequally into four-fold (toxicokinetics) and 2.5-fold (toxicodynamics), the UF for intraspecies extrapolation should be split evenly (3.16-fold for both kinetics and dynamics) (see Figure 1). 

In summary, four pillars support the structure of Good Laboratory Practice. All of them serve important functions in the context of performing and monitoring safety studies, and all of them need to be based on the strong conviction that GLP is the one mean to achieve quality data. Certainly, there are other aspects and issues in GLP that may be seen as nearly equally important, and they will be dealt with extensively further on, but Test Facility Management, Quality Assurance, Study Director, and National Compliance Monitoring Authorities are the key positions where real adherence to the Principles of GLP, not only by the letter but by the spirit of them, is determined in the end. 

It can be stated without any exaggeration that the most important individual in the context of GLP compliance is the Study Director. The Study Director, who is defined - in rather innocent looking wording - as the individual responsible for the overall conduct ofthe non-clinical health and environmental safety study , is the one person who is the central and pivotal individual within, and for, the whole study. The OECD Consensus Document on the Role and Responsibility of the Study Director (OECD No. 8, 1999) elaborates on this definition, and it very clearly describes the role of this individual as the sole point of study control . It is the Study Director who is the only person who bears the ultimate responsibility for adherence to the GLP Principles. In aU offices and laboratories around the world from time to time the old joke is displayed on the blackboard about the four people, named Somebody, Nobody, Anybody, and Everybody ( Somebody should do it. Everybody thought that Anybody could do it, and Nobody did it ). The GLP Principles want to avoid such a situation, which would jeopardise the recon-... 

The Framework Regulations provides exactly that a framework for the offshore safety regulation. It defines the common scope of application for all the regulations, their common purpose and definitions, who is to be responsible for complying with all the regulations, and the common main principles for health, safety and environment, including what is labelled health, safety and environment culture (Sect. 15). Within this framework, the four regulations spell out in some detail what is required in each of the specific areas. 

You ll find presentation material here for classroom use or for self-instruction. There are also workshop problems, and there s our Jacobs Sverdrup System Safety Scrapbook of ideas on the principles of system safety practice. You ll also find four bibliographies of texts pertinent to this field, as well as a System Safety and Risk Management Guide for Engineering Educators. All of these materials undergo revisions from time to time, so revisit the site often to see new and important items. 

These four historic defenses were the beginning of the shirking of, and excuses for, safety responsibility. By putting the blame on the worker, the safety burden is shifted to the employees, and statements such as The majority of injuries are as a result of the unsafe behavior of the worker reinforce this incorrect assumption and misdirect well-intended safety efforts. Safety culture shift involves recognizing the principle of multiple causes and forces employers to look beyond the injured worker to seek root causes of accidents. 

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