Occupational Health in Academic Research Laboratories: Upstream Factors of Risk

High profile injuries and fatalities in academic research laboratories have placed academic research safety culture in the spotlight. Academic research is a high-cost, high-risk investment of over 75 billion federal dollars in 2018. Three published guidelines and recommendations from American Chemical Society (ACS), National Research Council (NRC) and the American Association for Public Land Grant Universities (APLU) address this issue, as do some peer-reviewed studies, but no studies focus on universal solutions directly related to academia. The working conditions for faculty and staff performing multiple roles in research, instruction, and service can distract from safety oversight. Other challenges include dependence on an unreliable funding source and under-trained student workforce and decentralized training and compliance. The current COVID-19 pandemic has increased involvement of academic research institutions to help investigate the virus, and create and test vaccines. This development further highlights the need to focus on safety culture. The first aim used a scoping literature review and thematic analysis of the ACS, NRC and APLU reports to assess peer-reviewed studies related to safety culture in workplaces analogous to academic research laboratories to identify strategies from other workplaces that could address safety in academia. We found 55 articles related to safety culture from five different work sectors; academia, healthcare, biosafety, high mobility workplaces, and general workforce. We analyzed them using five thematic references from the safety recommendations: leadership, communication, training, ethics and funding. We identified a multi-factored definition of safety culture that includes critical elements of personal safety awareness, the safety climate, and the ethical commitment to safety and compliance. The second aim examined workplace safety interventions applicable to academia through the results of a literature review, investigation reports and tort cases related to incidents in academic research laboratories and government research institutions. We assessed whether recommendations from key safety reports factor into interventions. We found interventions related to ergonomics and total worker health; safety communication skills; checklist-based communication tools, error reporting, and team training. The third aim assessed potential predictors of failures in safety (defined as violations revealed during inspections, and reported injuries, near misses, or other adverse safety outcomes) using data from a large academic research institution. We used longitudinal multivariate regression analysis to estimate independent and joint associations between space usage, federal research funding, and work characteristics of PIs with adverse outcomes, and whether these outcomes differed by laboratory hazard rating. Across all laboratories, amount of laboratory space was consistently associated with higher rates of violations. PIs with non-tenured status differed in their effect on violation rates. In laboratories where PIs shared space, violation rates increased, with the exception of LHR3 laboratories. This dissertation contributes to research on academic safety culture by uniquely analyzing relevant literature and identifying elements useful for application in this context, and by quantitatively examining the various upstream factors of risk for adverse safety outcomes to inform regulatory and policy support for interventions and infrastructural changes in the academic research workplace.PHDEnvironmental Health SciencesUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/163266/1/bkatrina_1.pd