Evaluation of safety climate at a major public university

Several recent serious incidents in university laboratories have demonstrated the need for improvement in safety in academic settings. A recent report by the National Research Council of the National Academy calls for improvement in the safety culture of academic research. Safety culture is a collection of ideals and attitudes and quantitative measurement is not always possible. However, methods to measure “safety climate” have been developed and may be considered as a manifestation of the more broadly defined safety culture. Safety climate is a “snapshot” measurement of employees’ perceptions, attitudes, and beliefs about risk and safety. A 2011 survey of laboratory personnel for the development of a Hazard Mitigation Plan was used to estimate the safety climate at a major public university. The initial survey data was culled to 26 questions relating to laboratory safety concerns and codified to estimate safety climate. The results of this study provided an estimated safety climate rating for this university of 3.72 ± 1.71, on a scale of 1–5, with 5 indicating very high perception of safety. The comparison of these results with published safety climate concepts and numerical values from other universities indicate an overall “high” perception of safety climate at this university.