Field Work Safety Consultation Page
In order to improve safety for our field workers, members of the Labs and Studios Joint Health and Safety Committee have formed a separate committee including members from many departments on campus who conduct field work. The mandate of this committee has been to review the current policies, procedures and guidelines in place at Lakehead University as well as other Canadian Universities to create a Field Work Safety Policy and resources to assist Supervisors in planning for safe field work.
The review found a sufficient amount of pre-planning occurring in our individual departments, but also identified improvements to be made at an institutional policy level and documentation of planning and training. In response, the committee has created a draft policy for field work safety, and has reviewed some supporting documentation to assist in training and planning.
These documents are presented below for consultation and review by our wider community. Please distribute this email within your department/faculty to ensure that anyone wishing to provide comments has the opportunity to do so. Please provide comments/corrections to these documents before 15 July 2019, so they may be incorporated into the final documents presented to the Executive Team Working Group for approval. Comments provided in the original documents with tracked changes would be most helpful and should be emailed to labsafety@lakeheadu.ca.
Policy
Documentation
Field Work Personnel Training Record*
Resources
Example - Risk Assessment Guideline**
*This document has been in use since 2017 as part of the University's new personnel orientation process.
**Identification of hazards associated with individual research programs, and steps taken to mitigate risk of injury are required by the Ontario Health and Safety Act. This process is required to be documented. The document provided above is an example and may be used as a source to integrate relevant sections into individual research group's planning documentation, but will not be required as a standalone form.