Tips to Leverage Your Environmental Health and Safety Community

Environmental Health and Safety (EH&S) is a critical aspect to any educational institution, and technology has an essential role to play in ensuring effective management of the related safety and compliance tasks. Complex regulations, compliance requirements, and limited staffing and financial resources represent significant challenges for most colleges and university EH&S professionals. 

Additionally, there are numerous components of safety and compliance that campus EH&S professionals must contend with, including chemical inventory, hazardous waste management, inspections, permitting, occupational safety, incident tracking and investigations, and emergency planning. It’s a lot to keep track of and mismanagement in any area can increase the risk of injuries, fines, and damage to your institutional reputation. 

Below are a few tips to help ensure your EH&S office is leveraging your campus community to enhance its safety culture:

Top Tips for Implementing Effective EH&S Management 

1. Conduct a comprehensive risk assessment

Conducting a comprehensive risk assessment allows you to clearly catalog the severity and location of high hazard activities, materials, machinery, and equipment and outline the impact that these hazards can have on institutional operations. Communicating these key hazards to everyone in your campus safety community will help them better understand the processes, procedures, and mitigation strategies your institution has put in place to reduce institutional risk and increase compliance. 

1. Ask for help from others on campus

Once you have cataloged and clearly communicated key institutional risks and potential adverse outcomes to everyone in your campus safety community, you will be in a better position to ask for assistance with process changes to key functions like chemical inventory, safety inspections, permitting, and incident reporting. There are simply too many tasks for a resource constrained EH&S office to manage on its own. You need to put yourself in a position to be accountable, but not necessarily responsible, for every safety activity across campus.

1. Lean into technology

It is virtually impossible to monitor compliance and reduce risk if you have to manually audit the activities of everyone across campus who has been assigned a safety related task. You need technology that allows you to quickly see that all assigned tasks are being completed in a timely manner, including inspections, chemical inventory verifications, and issue remediations. 

1. Measure and report

Technology will also help you better understand and communicate trend data on the types, location, and severity of safety issues and incidents as they change over time. Showing trends in safety related activities and outcomes will also help support ongoing efforts to increase the resources allocated to EH&S!

How CampusOptics Can Help with EH&S Management 

EH&S professionals are a critical component of managing campus safety and compliance; however, EH&S is almost always understaffed and underfunded. 

Knowing how crucial of a role EH&S professionals play on campus, it’s important to arm them with technology that can effectively and efficiently manage multiple workflows. That’s where CampusOptics comes in. 

CampusOptics provides a centralized platform for monitoring and reporting, making it easier for resource-constrained colleges and universities to keep up with regulations and requirements. The key features of CampusOptics’s technology include real-time data tracking, automatic reporting, and customizable alerts, helping to ensure compliance and reduce the financial costs of non-compliance. 

In addition, it’s easy to track safety inspections, chemical inventory, and hazardous waste while also managing incident reports, safety related permits, and drill schedules.  CampusOptics’s technology provides an efficient and effective approach to managing EH&S and can help resource-constrained colleges and universities overcome the challenges of safety management.

Ready to get started with EH&S management? Book your personalized CampusOptics demo today.