4th National Symposium on Biosafety

Interactions that Make OHS Programs Work

Janet C. Gonder, DVM, PhD
Director, Division of Comparative Medicine
Baxter Healthcare Corporation
Baxter Tehnology Park, WG2-2S
Round Lake, IL 60073
708-270-5455

Good morning. It really is my pleasure to be here on the fifth and final day of this symposium. I think it has been a tremendously successful symposium. And just judging by the number of people who are still here on the last day, many are looking forward to the summaries of the breakout sessions that you were not able to attend because of the choices that had to be made in the last couple of days. The title of my talk is "Interactions that Make Occupational Health and Safety Programs Work". Now, I know most of you realize this subject has been covered in quite a bit of detail throughout this symposium and in fact one of the breakout summaries this morning will cover this topic. So rather then rehash some of the specifics of the interactions that make these programs work, I thought I would present some general thoughts, maybe some philosophy, that I see has come out of this conference as a whole.

When I got to the symposium, I went directly to the printed program to find out what was on the schedule. As many of you may have, I bypassed the inside cover of the program booklet. The inside cover is worth looking at and reflecting on the vision of this symposium. The vision of the symposium is that we look towards safe and reproducible research with healthy animals and healthy people. This is the goal of all of our occupational health and safety programs. To achieve this goal we need to look to the mission of this conference. When I think of goals and missions, I think back to the industry environment that I'm part of at Baxter Healthcare many of you have been through the same kinds of experiences that I have. Get a group of people together doing a team building exercise, or a group in a management seminar and the first thing on the agenda is to spend the first day and a half working out the mission for the group. We toil over every word and every phrase to determine what applies to what we want to accomplish. And I think both the vision and the mission set out for this conference, in fact, can be taken back to your institutions and put nto use. There are some very good points expressed. There are a few words and phrases we can look at. The mission speaks to the importance of what you have been involved in for the last couple of days. Certainly this symposium has provided a forum that represents an environment that facilitates communication and interaction. We clearly have had many opportunities to do just that. We've had tremendous exchange of ideas and information. We have taken that forward and identified what happens when you have an environment in which to exchange ideas. That is, we can use that forum to identify hazards and assess the risks. Then, of course, we need to implement the program in order to reach the vision, which is safe and reproducible research. So, based on this brief review, I think we would all conclude that this symposium has been a tremendous success and that the mission of the symposium has indeed been accomplished. Look around you in this audience and look at the diversity of backgrounds and experience of the speakers and all of the participants. I paged through the list of attendees this morning and it is amazing the backgrounds and experience of the people that have been here for the last several days. So I would encourage you to take the vision and mission of this symposium home with you. Taylor Bennett yesterday mentioned the power of having just a few people at your institution return with some ideas and some excitement about what they've seen in a particular meeting. That's why we're all here. We need to bring back the collective wisdom of all the people here. We certainly would be hard-pressed at our own institutions to find this much common sense, knowledge, judgement and wisdom all in one place in order to form ideas for our occupational health and safety programs.

This slide illustrates many of the functions and the people that become involved in the development and implementation of our programs. Most of these people and functions were on your list of attendees. Maybe one that's missing from this slide is the regulatory function, although regulatory doesn't necessarily get involved directly at most institutions. Certainly there is opportunity to communicate with regulatory agencies and representatives. This is not really meant to be all inclusive, nor does it imply that all of these functions or people will be involved in developing programs at your institutions. Perhaps you don't work with radioisotopes and therefore the radiation safety office would not be a player in your program planning.

The recently revised Guide for the Care and Use of Laboratory Animals and the soon to be published ILAR Occupational Health and Safety document have emphasized five broad areas that should generally be included in developing programs at most institutions. I'll quote from the new guide. "An effective program relies on strong administrative support and interactions among several institutional functions or activities, including the research program as represented by the investigator; the animal care and use program as represented by the veterinarians and the institutional animal care and use committees; the environmental health and safety program, occupational health services, and the administration (for example, human resources, finance, and facility maintenance personnel. The organization of this slide, or rather the disorganization of this slide conveys that the lines of communication and the focus of activity at your institution is going to depend on your program. That cannot be prescribed. I think you have to determine that. In this slide, however, the employee is at the center and we have to always recognize that the employee plays a critical role. So, again, this is accomplished in your program and how you get these people together is certainly up to you.. So regardless of who you get involved, or who is in charge, its the "what" and "how" that will depend on all of the players which you bring together.

Hazard identification and risk assessment depends upon the type of research. Those intrinsic hazards, the animal species, and regulatory environment in which you work may hae some influence on what is required for your occupational health and safety programs. We didn't cover that in much detail at this conference but it certainly needs to be considered. And then, of course, occupational health. The revised Guide says that an effective occupational health and safety program ensures that the risks associated with the experimental use of animals are reduced to acceptable levels. That's our challenge. Having done all of these things and identified the hazards and assessed the risks, we then have to determine who is going to participate in our occupational health and safety programs. We've gotten away now from "substantial animal contact"as a primary determinant and defined it much more broadly. That will be, perhaps, easier to deal with and ln some ways more difficult, because we're going to have to spend some time defining what all of that means. The revised Guide says that the extent and level of participation of personnel in the occupational health and safety program should be based on the hazards posed by the animals and materials used; the exposure intensity, duration, and frequency; on the susceptibility of the personnel; and on the history of occupational illness and inJury in the particular workplace. We cannot make that determination without input from many individuals in the program.

The next phase is implementation. Much of this symposium has focused on this piece of the program. How to get things done. How to bring this to the workplace. We've covered all of these topics in quite a bit of detail.

The last, training and education,is probably best illustrated by the training workshop on Saturday. I believe there were 127 attendees at that workshop. The topics covered were really the day-to-day operational things that we deal with that technicians and animal care personnel have to be concerned with. These individuals can provide a tremendous amount of input in planning of your programs.

We've covered biosafety levels specific to the animal environment, the workplace, sharps management, disinfection, decontamination, containment devices, and quality assurance. All of these things really point to the challenge that we have in getting everyone together. The challenge is to pull all of this together and make some order out of this crowd of people. Hopefully with some common sense. I would urge you then to take the vision of this symposium back to your institutions for safe and reproducable research, healthy animals and healthy people.

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Interactions that Make OHS Programs Work