Ensuring lab safety excellence through COVID-19 and beyond

Hi, my name is Dan Scungio. I'm a laboratory safety officer for Sentara Healthcare, which is a multi-hospital system in Virginia and North Carolina in the United States. I'm also known as Dan the lab safety man. I'm a laboratory safety consultant. I call myself the superhero of lab safety, and my goal is to make laboratories across the world safer places to work for the laboratorians who are there.

Biosafety in the laboratory, it's one of the keystones of the overall safety management program. And the clinical laboratories where my focus tends to be, we're handling specimens all day long and many of them are infectious. We have to treat them all using standard precautions which means we treat them all as if they were all potentially infectious. And so, there are a lot of practices we have to have in place using the Hierarchy of Controls, or we can't use the best thing, which is elimination of the hazards, we must work with them. We can't really substitute the biohazards we work with, so we start with our engineering controls, our work practice controls, and our personal protective equipment or PPE. All of those tools are vitally important for working in an environment where there are biosafety hazards.

In many of our laboratories, in many of our clinical laboratories, we use NuAire technology. Probably the most important piece of equipment we use that is NuAire technology is the biosafety cabinet. We have several throughout our system in different kinds of laboratories. Every clinical laboratory has one, our molecular laboratory, our microbiology laboratories. And these biological safety cabinets became of critical importance in the last year and a half in the COVID-19 pandemic. We started receiving specimens when we began COVID-19 testing and we didn't know what to do with it. We weren't sure at the beginning of the pandemic whether it was safe to handle these specimens. But, we knew it would be safe to use the biological safety cabinet for these specimens. And that, to this day, is where we handle those specimens when they come to us. That's where we prep them for testing, and in some areas, that's where we are doing the testing because it creates that safety environment for the employee. It protects the employee, it protects the environment. Our typical biological safety cabinet is a Class II A2, and that protects the environment, the sample, and most importantly, the employee.

So there are a couple of different projects that I'm working on right now. One of the things that I'm trying to do is raise awareness and develop programs regarding drilling for certain emergency type of events that occur in the laboratory. There are some events that occur rarely, but it's really important to know how to respond to those events. And one good example of that is a chemical spill or a hazmat event in a laboratory. They don't happen very often, but if there's a large incident, a large spill, it becomes very important how we respond to that. We need to respond quickly, and we need to respond efficiently. And if we don't drill that, people aren't going to know how to do it. And we've seen it over and over again.

Another project that I'm working on, I have an annual academy for lab safety excellence. That's in my consulting role, and that's a virtual training series. So, I'm putting together my 2022 program that's available already. And as part of that, one of the offerings in that program is a new book I've developed. And it's really important to me. I used to be a laboratory manager and I understand how hard it is to balance safety with all of the other things that a manager has to do, staffing, scheduling, quality inspections, and all these other things. And so I put together this book called, "52 Laboratory Safety Tips for Leaders," so that you can focus on one item a week and get your laboratory safety program in place and running on a regular basis and keeping it up throughout the year.

So looking ahead to the future biosafety, I'm not sure there's going to be any great changes if you are a biosafety officer or somebody in charge of laboratory safety. For years, we've been using the Hierarchy of Controls to guide us. We've been using risk management and risk assessments. And although we've learned some lessons from the past and we've had some surprises, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic, as technology changes and as we move ahead, we're still going to be looking at biosafety in much the same way. And what I mean by that is how we manage it. And so, we're going to look at the risks.

So, if some new technology of some new testing, of some new types of samples that might be coming into the laboratory, and we're going to look at ways to mitigate those risks. That is how you manage biosafety, and that's probably not going to change as we move ahead into the future. It's important to do that. It's important to know your risks and to be able to handle the risks. And so, moving ahead, we want to be able to do that. Are we going to have to change, maybe make some tweaks to some of the things we do because of the pathogens or because of the technology? Perhaps, but we're still going to have the overall same approach.