Hazard Lab

This blog post was written by Laura Mason, Departmental Health and Safety Officer for MEE at the

University of Sheffield - laura.mason@sheffield.ac.uk

From the moment that students begin their engineering degrees at the University of Sheffield, MEE are

focused on providing world leading practical education that will equip graduates with the necessary skills

and experience they need when entering the workforce. A big part of this is to ensure that health and safety

knowledge and practice is considered integral to the way we work. Safety is already embedded into all of

our sessions and pre and post lab activities - but we want more. 

Hazard lab is part of a new health and safety education initiative that is being developed as a series of

buildable blocks that can be used across all of our engineering disciplines.

What? 

Hazard lab sits as part of our introduction labs and ran for the first time in 2023 during week 1 of teaching.

As a trial the session was delivered to our 1st year aerospace, civil and structural, interdisciplinary and

mechanical engineering degree students of which there are around 800.  A teaching space that will be used

at some point by these students was set up with a series of common hazards for them to identify.

Why?

There are several aims of the session:

1. To familiarise students with a laboratory/workshop environment - the building and its labs can be large

and unfamiliar when you are just getting settled into university life.

2. To help students identify common causes of hazard within a lab environment and how they can be

controlled.

3. To highlight that although these hazards may always be present, there will be controls in place to

help minimise risk.

4. To make safety fun and memorable!

How?

9 common hazards were identified and information sheets were developed for each hazard; working at

height, manual handling, slips and trips, chemicals and harmful substances, fire, machinery, electricity,

noise and personal protective equipment. The information sheets needed to be concise and engaging whilst

furnishing the students with the basic knowledge required

Heath and Stacey's Hazard Lab information sheets.

Once the common hazards had been selected a space was set up in part of our workshop with the hazards

included. To help bring the scene to life the newest members of the MEE safety team (Heath and Stacey)

were brought in to assist after it was decided it might be inappropriate to use ‘real’ staff.

This is what the students would see when entering Hazard Lab for the in person segment of the session.

Students were timetabled 20 at a time for 20 minutes.

After a brief introduction to the session the students were given 5 minutes to study the scene and chat

about what they could see and why they thought there was a hazard. To conclude the in person session

the students were split into two groups to discuss with staff what they could see and why they thought it was

a hazard.

The second part of the session was online. Here the students accessed a digital version of the scene that

they could pan around and included sound effects and hot links to the information sheets. This part took

around 30 minutes.

To ensure the students did actually read the information sheets a short quiz concluded the online session,

with successful completion required to pass.

Conclusions and what next?

Overall the sessions ran smoothly, with initial feedback positive, although a worrying number of students

think that the safest way to work a height is to use the biggest ladder that you can find.

There are plans for a larger, more immersive scene that students could walk through. This could provide a more immersive experience than a limited static scene crammed with hazards.

Work on how to scale the event up for next year whilst being able to reach all first year students within a week has begun. The way that the students approach the session also need some reconfiguring; this year many students had already attempted the online part of the session before arriving at the in person event. Typically students are expected to completed some pre lab work online prior to attendance. A way of replicating the

same process would be beneficial for the students and help to ensure a consistency of approach across our teaching.