Every year, April 28 marks the National Day of Mourning, a time to reflect and honour those who have lost their lives or suffered injury or illness due to workplace-related hazards. Creating a safe workplace is a fundamental value at the University of Alberta and a shared responsibility of everyone to keep our campuses safe.
Eric Flaim, director of the University of Alberta’s CREATE initiative within the Faculty of Engineering supervises a team that suffered a workplace incident despite their rigorous safety practices and standards. A staff member was performing routine work on a ladder, running lines within a laboratory ceiling. While they descended the ladder, they fell backwards and hit their head on the floor, which resulted in a traumatic head injury. Flaim reflects on the impact of this incident on not only the individual and their family, but the collective team, and how it’s changed the way they work.
How did the incident impact your team and how did you support your team members afterwards?
There was an immediate and profound sense of concern, grief and regret, as everyone, including those who weren’t directly involved, thought about what they could have done differently to avoid such a tragic incident from happening to their friend and colleague. Everyone was genuinely concerned and supportive of the staff member and their family.
As a group, we organized food drop-offs to the staff member’s house, carpooled family members around the city, drove the staff member’s car home, organized baskets and essentials to help the family during the hospital stay and coordinated respectful communication and hospital/home visits. Supporting the staff member and their family became the main priority for the group and a focus of how we responded in the immediate aftermath of the incident.
Has the incident changed the way you approach your work?
Our work environment is filled with many dangers and hazards. We deal with large volumes of hazardous, dangerous and toxic chemicals and gasses. All of this is managed in an open-access lab environment where we have a variety of both experienced and inexperienced people wanting to access our equipment and processes.
For decades, we have prided ourselves on our safety culture and lack of incidents with the students and external users who access our labs. But regarding the obvious hazards in our lab environment, we lost sight of the dangers in our own day-to-day work and became complacent toward the risks in simple things like using a ladder. The biggest change following this incident is a renewed focus on the day-to-day dangers that staff encounter, that we may take for granted.
What has been the biggest lesson learned from the incident?
That despite how well you think you are doing in regard to safety — or even when you’re in a work environment that is well run with no incidents – it can be the simple things that cause problems, not the obvious dangers that you think about and have purposefully dealt with.
How are you working to improve and reinforce safety practices and a strong safety culture within your team?
While we still feel that our safety practices are above average for the hazards and work environment we manage, we have taken a greater internal perspective and look at our individual work practices to ensure that not only those who access the lab, but all our individual staff members are more safety conscious. Specific actions we took included developing hazard assessments for all individual staff work and practices and migrating our hazard assessment documentation to the Hazard Assessment Web Application (HAWApp), an online tool that provides greater transparency and approval mechanisms. By focusing on staff-specific work, we were able to enhance a variety of personal protective equipment, procedures and reporting processes that were potentially taken for granted.
We have also started to implement practice drills and response scenarios for potential onsite incidents. Overall, there has been a sustained and renewed focus on individual staff, while maintaining vigilance on our overall unit safety culture in training and providing access to students.
As a supervisor, what does it mean to you to be a safety champion within the context of the Culture of Care?
For me, ultimately, it’s a profound responsibility and privilege that transcends simply following regulations and compliance policies. It’s about leading by example, learning and adapting to situations, ensuring supportive supervision to staff and being resilient and compassionate in the face of tragedy. The Culture of Care isn’t about assigning blame or finding scapegoats but about ensuring that we all get home safely at the end of the day.
