Good Practices For Managing A Safe Chemical Laboratory Part 4: Records, Documents And Regulations

Abstract

Documenting lab activity promotes safety, provides data useful in safety analysis and planning and creates a paper trail that can be used as evidence of compliance with local, state and federal regulations. Whether in academia or industry, the chemical laboratory must operate in compliance with a large number of regulations. Laboratory records play a large part in incident and accident investigation. Records and documents should be created with very specific goals in mind. They should be designed to meet these goals, preferably by those who ultimately will use them and be “standardized,” as much as possible. They should be subject to change control and retained for a prescribed period of time under conditions that will maintain their integrity. Having approved, written standard operating procedures (SOPs) in place for routine laboratory unit operations provides lab management with another way to leverage safety at the bench level.