Safety Risk Assessment in Medical and Paramedical Education Laboratories

Background: Considering the reported positive effects of risk management practices and monitoring them by conducting risk assessments and achieving safety improvements, this study was conducted to assess the risks in the educational laboratories of Qom University of Medical Sciences. Methods: This cross sectional study was conducted in 13 medical and paramedical educational laboratories. To assess safety conditions in the laboratories, a comprehensive safety checklist was developed, and in order to assess the risks of laboratories, a method called FMEA was used. Two trained occupational health and safety experts evaluated the laboratories understudy, identified the hazards, completed the relevant checklists, and subsequently ranked them based on severity, occurrence, and detection. Finally, a comparison was made based on the calculated Risk Priority Number (RPN) for each hazard. Results: In general, the fire hazards and electrical hazards of 54% of the laboratories have been accompanied by normal risk (RPN 70), and nearly 8% of the laboratories had critical fire and electrical risks, including chemistry and immunology laboratories. In the case of equipment hazards, nearly 60% of the laboratories had critical or semicritical risk levels. It is indicated that health exposure hazards were the most important hazards compared to the other ones. So that 61.5% of the laboratories had critical risk, and 15.3 % of them categorized as semicritical risk. The highest RPN allocated to the biochemistry and chemistry laboratories (RPN 250). Conclusion: The results of this study showed that in general, three types of hazards, including health hazards, equipment, and material storage, should be given priority.