Biosafety and the Workplace

Biosafety is a discipline that is most often applied to work in the laboratory or to research-related activities. However, as the COVID-19 pandemic ramped up, organizations started to understand their risks in the workplace outside the laboratory and the applicability of biosafety became apparent. It was at this point that they called our team at MRIGlobal to assist in four main areas:

1. First was the interpretation of the recommendations and requirements issued by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the World Health Organization (WHO), and other public health authorities. A critical part of our daily work was and is staying abreast of such topics;
2. Second was to help perform a risk identification and analysis of various workspaces, ranging from individual rooms and floors to multi-building complexes;
3. We were then asked to help prioritize and plan risk responses, and in some cases provide on-call support to clients when incidents did occur; and,
4. Finally, we were frequently asked to help plan how our clients communicated key information about internal pandemic-related policies and procedures to their staff, which in some cases included us developing and providing training for staff members that was tailored to specific sites and activities.