How do You Train Employees To Stay Focused on Safety When Their Work Becomes Routine?

Gomez is assistant vice chancellor for facilities management and environmental health and safety at the University of California, Irvine (UCI). The university is known for a strong commitment to undergraduate education and top research and graduate programs. Its new school of law graduates its first class this year.

According to Gomez, safety is increasingly integrated into campus culture. One means to do this is to identify an onsite safety representative within each of the approximately 800 work units on the vast campus. The EHS staff works with these individuals to help them improve safety at their sites.

Another valuable resource is the university’s EHS academic coordinators. These are staff members funded jointly by academic departments and the EHS office. The coordinator combines knowledge of safety and health with insight into the work of the department to make recommendations about procedures. Gomez says this model has contributed to UCI’s status as the campus with the lowest injury and severity rates in the UC system.

Need safety training? Try a demo of BLR’s remarkable award-winning TrainingToday at no cost or obligation. Get the details.

Committed to Training
Like other organizations with a strong safety culture, UCI is committed to excellence in training. At the University of California Learning Center employees receive training—both online and live—required by Cal/OSHA and by the university. The center is a single source of training and a repository of who has been trained on what.

There’s a special emphasis on training for the campus’s 450 labs whose employees routinely work with biological, radioactive, chemical, and other types of hazardous materials.

Lab training is structured around a 12-module core safety curriculum. The EHS department partners with site safety representatives to create training procedures specific to the work of individual labs. A new course called “Creating Safety Culture in Your Lab” was developed to meet the specific needs of principal investigators—individuals who lead research projects.

A separate curriculum with eight modules has been developed for other (nonlab) workers. All employees can log onto the training site and take a quick self-assessment that determines what training is needed to safely perform their jobs.

Unlimited safety training! Demo the award-winning TrainingToday. There’s no cost or obligation. Try it.

In tomorrow’s Advisor, we’ll look at how mindfulness-based safety training can help prevent accidents–plus explore an all-in-one online training resource to help you meet your safety training goals.