On-line Safety System
Developed with the School of Medicine at the University of Sheffield; the Online-Safety System provides a gateway to safety management for members of the School. It includes CoSHH, which has been adapted to make it more relevant for biological agents. There is also an on-line substance safety data catalogue, and the Standard Operating Procedures library. The Risk Assessments system (STAR), developed for the University, is linked from within OSS.
Recent itterations of the CoSHH system, upon which OSS is based, have included a great deal more focus on the evaluation of exposure to substances during a procedure, though each lcient is viewing this requirement in different ways, and have evolved different procedures for capturing this information as part of their assessment process.
The update also introduced provision for the establishment of standardised processes. In this users could opt to electronically sign an existing CoSHH assessment, rather than publishing a new assessment for each process they wished to undertake. This change ties in well with the operation of the School of Medicine, where most users only encounter potentially hazardous substances as part of a well documented procedure, such as fixing histology slides.
The ability to sign existing, approved, COSHH assessments greatly simplifies the management of CoSHH. The administrator has fewer procedures to evaluate, but can be more thorough in ensuring that a full and accurate process is described in them. The balance of the work of managing safety within the laboratory environment is that of checking that the user wanting to undertake the procedure is sufficiently trained and competent to do this. This task can generally best undertaken by the academic supervisor in the first instance, as she will have direct experience of working with the student involved.
The OSS system can only be accessed by members of the University of Sheffield:
