Risk assessment
Every employer is required to do risk assessment for the business and activities. This also includes all activities research groups have in the Laboratory Animal Facility, and is the responsibility of the project manager.
Main content
A risk assessment is a systematic review of what can cause injury, illness or damages in your workplace so you can assess whether you have taken enough precautions or whether you should do more to prevent. The goal is that no one is injured or becomes ill. Accidents and bad health can ruin a human life, while it may have consequences for the business in terms of staff absence, lost production, damaged equipment, etc. The Working Environment Act requires that all businesses must assess all risks in the workplace.
The Laboratory Animal Facility does risk assessment of its own activities, but do not have an overview of the research groups' activities. Each research group must risk assess all aspects of their experiments, and the project manager must make sure that this is done.
You will find a standard form for this on this page.
When working with animals you must also include risk assessment considering animal welfare, and factors that can ruin the experiment/research results.
The Norwegian Labour Inspection Authority has a page on its website on risk assessment (in Norw).
The University also has a lot of information.
Relevant risks in an animal facility may include: development of allergy, cuts, bites, scratches, slippery floors, use of gases, radiation, use of chemotherapeutic agents, chemicals, poor ventilation, improper use of clothing, wrong glove use, wrong respiration protection, lack of personal protective equipment, expose a pregnant person to anesthetic gases, lack of vaccines, to be exposed to biological agents, and much more.
The project manager must make a systematic overview of such risks, possible causes, its consequences, and measures to prevent that such situations occur. It is an advantage if this is done in collaboration with the project group members, and everyone in the group must receive this information.
The Norwegian Labour Inspection Authority has proposed a form for risk assessment on their web pages. The Lab Animal Facility has prepared its own, see pdf here to the right with excerpts as an example. We choose to include all unwanted situations. This includes situations which might be hazardous to personnel, could harm the animals, and/or could ruin research results. The list is by no means complete, this is only an excerpt.
