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Date: Sat, 7 Feb 2004 11:18:32 -0500
Reply-To: chemcon**At_Symbol_Here**JUNO.COM
Sender: DCHAS-L Discussion List <DCHAS-L**At_Symbol_Here**LIST.UVM.EDU>
From: Jay Young <chemcon**At_Symbol_Here**JUNO.COM>
Subject: Re: Chemical Safety Training Programs
Comments: To: rstuart**At_Symbol_Here**UVM.EDU
Ralph,
How smart is your safety committee chairman anyway. It should be obvious
that the number of contact hours required to achieve competence in
practicing chemical safety would depend upon the extent of knowledge the
learner has to start with. Examples: Does he/she know the common
incompatible reactive pairs such as strong acid+base, powerful
oxidizing+reducing agents, and so on? Can he/she give examples of such
pairs? Does he/she know where to find this information, e.g., in
Bretherick or has he/she never heard of Bretherick? Can he/she describe
(briefly) the content of the OSHA lab standard? Do they know what an
MSDS is? Can the read an MSDS and make sense out of what is printed?
Can they identify errors in an MSDS? and so on and so on.
In other words, your chairman asked you a question that is impossible to
answer except to say that it depends upon the person being trained.
Jay
On Fri, 6 Feb 2004 06:33:53 -0500 Ralph Stuart writes:
> In a meeting yesterday, the chair of our Chemistry Department safety
> committee asked me what constituted "adequate training" for a
> Chemistry Department in the regulatory sense. My answer as that,
> since the Chemical Hygiene Standard is performance based standard,
> there is no clear answer to this question (he asked it in terms of
> contact hours); the proof of an adequate training program is in a
> laboratory's "safety performance" as assessed on site.
>
> For good reasons, this is not a particularly satisfactory answer.
> In
> trying to think of a better one, I remembered that several times
> over
> the last 10 years various people and organizations have collected
> data from around the U.S. about what safety training various
> academic
> programs provide to their students. I wonder if anyone knows where
> the results of this might be published? (Yes, I think I contributed
> a
> paper about this to a CHAS meeting several years ago; no, the paper
> was never written up.)
>
> If I can't find any published information about this, I'll probably
> be back to the list next week with a request for information.
>
> Thanks for any help.
>
> - Ralph
> --
>
> Ralph Stuart, CIH
> Environmental Safety Manager
> University of Vermont
> Environmental Safety Facility
> 667 Spear St.
> Burlington, VT 05405
>
> rstuart**At_Symbol_Here**uvm.edu
> fax: (802)656-5407
>
> Owner:
> SAFETY list (general discussion of environmental health and safety)
> LAB-XL list (performance oriented environmental regulation of
> laboratories)
>
>
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