The University of Wyoming Environmental Health and Safety Department is in the process of developing the safety policy that it currently lacks.
“The university at this point does not have an overarching safety type of policy,” Nancy Fox, director of EHS, said. “A policy is critical to an environmental health and safety management system. It’s the cornerstone of the system.”
Fox presented the draft EHS has recently developed to Faculty Senate on Monday. While there is only a draft right now, the final policy will most likely be implemented by May.
The proposed policy outlines the responsibilities of the administration and contains a policy statement, which states that “people represent the University’s most important asset and protecting that asset is the university’s greatest responsibility.”
The draft also says that the university is committed to reducing “university-related accidents, illnesses, injuries, environmental incidents, and property damage” and intends to do so by “complying with national, state, and local regulations, providing information and safeguards to faculty, staff, and students and to foster a positive safety culture.”
“This policy outlines the commitment to safety from the administration and that is key,” Fox said at the Faculty Senate meeting. “It also contributes to a positive safety culture.”
Fox defined safety culture as the “way safety is perceived, valued, and acted upon,” in an organization. She used examples of when safety culture was not valued and global disasters occurred in cases such as the Chernobyl nuclear disaster and the 2010 BP oil spill.
“There have been some high profile cases where production was valued over the safety culture,” Fox said.
While there is no official safety policy for UW right now, Fox said EHS does have a safety coordinator program where members from about 110 different departments on campus get together to get safety information out. The EHS also has different processes for picking up hazardous waste, doing laboratory inspections, and safety trainings off-campus.
The EHS also gives the EHS director the authority to shut down operations it feels are not being conducted properly or safely.
“If we see something that is being handled unsafely then we can go in and close down that operation. We don’t use that very often, but it is there and it does need to be,” Fox said.
To increase safety awareness on campus, Fox says online safety courses are administered and about four departments on campus have safety committees. She also noted that it can be somewhat difficult to get safety information to the nearly 6,000 employees and the estimated 14,000 students on campus.
“Another reason this policy is important is that I have a staff of 10 EHS employees and UW has over 6000 employees and 13,000 students,” Fox said. “With numbers like that you can see that safety needs to be of what we all do, every day whether we are faculty, staff or students. Involving everybody on campus is critical,” Fox said.
The EHS is seeking feedback on the proposed policy and it will need to be approved by the Board of Trustees before it can be implemented.
