Accidents can occur when carrying out simple, daily tasks within the laboratory. Workers can face many hazards on a daily basis from chemicals, radioactivity, physical hazards (eg, trips hazards, heavy objects), electricity, and of course biological agents themselves. Task risk assessment is an essential part of biosafety management in the laboratory.

Purpose

The need to conduct risk assessments forms a central part of all major guidance documents relating to biological safety and security. The need to demonstrate assessments have been produced is also increasingly becoming the focus of regulators and other stakeholders.

However, in reality managers often struggle to identify an efficient and effective process for conducting task risk assessments. The DNV task risk assessment approach builds upon our experience managing risk in a wide variety of industries, and applies risk management principles to situations where workers are handling biological agents and associated hazards.

The methodology can be applied to any task of work in a containment laboratory, such as an experimental procedure (eg, the cultivation of a biological agent) or the use of a particular item of equipment (egg, centrifuge).

Our involvement can be to facilitate workshops, provide training in good practice, or even to implement complete risk management systems across your organisation.

Benefits

The benefits of task risk assessment in your laboratory include:
• Developing a structured and transparent process for management of task risk
• Demonstrating responsible management of risk
• Helping to keep your people safe and secure

Our approach

The approach is designed to ensure participants learn the task risk assessment methodology, which they can then apply to their own work activities. The methodology is team-orientated and results in a structured and comprehensive process to identify hazards, evaluate risks and set in place effective control measures.

As well as delivering consultancy advice on the best risk management approach for your organisation, we can also provide experienced risk assessment leaders and recorders, together with the associated checklists, risk matrices and other supporting information.

We have also developed advanced tools, including the DNV Biorisk software application, designed to simplify recording and reporting of risk across the organisation.