ASU Environmental Health & Safety Award for Excellence
The award is the highest level of recognition by EHS and is presented to a college, department, individual or team who showcase distinguished service toward campus safety or sustainable practices at ASU. Any university employee may submit a nomination. Submissions must include a detailed statement outlining the nominee’s outstanding performance in meeting at least one of the key criteria:
• Incident response beyond the call of duty.
• Leadership in safety or sustainability excellence.
• Longevity of commitment to ASU safety or sustainability.
Sarah Arrowsmith has developed an excellent culture of equipment maintenance and training. She assigns a researcher to maintain and train newcomers, minimizing risks and possible equipment failures. She works with these designated researchers to ensure each instrument is maintained. She recently did an assessment of our waste generation in order to discuss possible ways to minimize it. This was an excellent discussion among researchers that led to new protocols to minimize waste.
Sarah established needles/sharps training in July of 2019. She helped to create a Canvas Onboarding course and the establishment of a safety contract and disseminates weekly/monthly safety notices in meetings and emails. Sarah involves students when filing for IBC’s so that they know how risk assessments work. She delivered a risk assessment workshop during a Whole Center meeting in September of 2019.
“Sarah Arrowsmith has taken creative leadership steps to improve sustainability and safety within the Biodesign Swette Center for Environmental Biotechnology. She created PowerPoint presentations on topics that apply to almost everyone. She developed fun group activities to highlight important safety concepts. She is very well integrated with ASU and Biodesign EH&S so that we gain from their experience and insight. Perhaps most telling is that Sarah is a go-to resource for Biodesign EH&S and laboratory coordinators around Biodesign. Finally, she does all of this in a friendly, collegial manner that encourages people to be safe and sustainable because they feel a part of our Center.” Bruce Rittmann, PhD.
ASU Laboratory Safety Innovation Award
The ASU Laboratory Safety Committee, in partnership with Knowledge Enterprise and Environmental Health and Safety, called for applicants to enter the annual Laboratory Safety Innovation Award competition. The competition recognizes innovative implementation of a research safety program and acknowledges outstanding involvement of a principal investigator and support of senior administrators who demonstrate the shared commitment to the safe and responsible conduct of research in a laboratory setting. A laboratory is defined as a facility or room where the use of potentially hazardous chemicals, biological agents or sources of energy (e.g., lasers, high voltage, radiation) are used for scientific experimentation, research or education. The criteria for the award required an innovative safety plan that will be implemented in your program or process, including details on how this plan will be implemented and internally evaluated.
Needles and Sharps Training Program
Our innovation was a new Needles and Sharps Training Program. The objective was to create a Needles and Sharps Canvas Course to help track who has taken sharps training and in-person mentoring in the Center. This class should increase awareness about sharps and decrease incidents of needle sticks and injuries in our Center. The class can be exported for use in other labs who use needles.
Historically, there have been some needle sticks and other accidents related to sharps use. Although rare, due to the nature of the materials we work with (human originated samples, potential pathogens), when a researcher does get injured, it causes great concern.
Often needle sticks are related to the use of serum bottles. Inserting a needle into a serum bottle’s rubber stopper, staff can miss the stopper and stick his or her hand instead, or sustain a rebound stick when pulling the needle out of the stopper. We attempted to purchase puncture proof gloves for safe handling of needles and serum bottles, however the puncture-resistant material was only found on the palm of the hand, and all of our serum-bottle injuries happened on the top of the hand between the thumb and forefinger.
Many lab members also use gas-tight syringes and frictionless syringes with luerlock needles for sampling and injecting gases into instruments for analysis. These needles must be removed from the syringes, as the syringes are not disposable. Removing luer-lock needles can be dangerous, and some injuries have resulted because of this. This has led to an inclination to recap needles, which is against ASU policy. Researchers in our Center have been actively working with Biosafety to find and implement innovative solutions to prevent needle sticks.
Our Solution:
1. Canvas Course Development. This will include a short training video about how to safely handle needles and other sharps. This video will be a general overview to increase mindfulness. The canvas module will also include a short quiz to review what students have learned and reinforce the important take-home messages. The training course will be available to all of our lab members for internal use. This will be either a stand-alone course or a module within our current onboarding Canvas course.
2. Development and Implementation of In-Person Training Standards. The lab coordinator or research supervisor will provide in-person training to include the following:
- how to safely lock a needle and syringe in
place;
- how to transport needles/syringes safely from bench samples to instruments;
- how to properly use our newly-invented needle guard (see below);
- how to safely remove needles from non-disposable syringes, including how to remove needles using the lip on red sharps bins;
- what to do when injuries do happen, including first aid and how to report an injury.
At the completion of the mentoring section, students will sign the needle use SOP.
Current Program Status:
Since June 2019, we have been filming and mentoring training sessions. The training videos still need to be edited and uploaded to canvas for internal use. Needle guards have been handed out to applicable researchers. As researchers begin to use them, the design will continue to be refined. We hope to have the training program completed and available to new incoming lab members early in the spring semester. The current Needles and Sharps Standard Operating Procedure is currently being modified based on the feedback that was received during the mentoring sessions.
Early Results:
Since implementing the needle guards in June, there have been no needle sticks. We also combined the physical guard with training sessions on general sharps and needle safety. The in-person needle safety training included a sharps SOP and a demonstration of how to safely remove luer-lock needles from non-disposable syringes (such as frictionless syringes and gas tight syringes), by using pliers rather than fingers. For non-luer-lock needles, lab members were shown how to use the needle remover groove on the sharps containers. We found that having in-person training that emphasizes the work the users are doing, and eliciting input from participants regarding special challenges or solutions they’ve faced, was a very effective way to teach users how to safely use needles as well as continually update our SOP and training content to include relevant issues. These sessions have been filmed, so the institutional knowledge will not be lost.
At a celebration on December 4, 2019, Dr. Krajmalnik-Brown and Sarah accepted the award on behalf of our Center and provided background for the project. Eventually, EH&S wants to make the program available throughout ASU. We are grateful for out team’s ongoing support in this endeavor to keep our people safe!
