Training Changes for All Laboratories
October 3, 2022
MSU’s Environmental Health & Safety is implementing several significant changes to how training will be documented.
Lab Safety Tracks
You may be familiar with individual courses being listed under specific tracks or requirements in the Ability system. Many PI and lab managers have requested that courses commonly required in their lab be grouped together to simplify the assignment of training to new personnel. EHS now offers 3 tracks based on materials used.
- Lab Safety-Basics: for laboratories with chemicals but no biological safety risks
- Lab Safety-Basics + Biological: for laboratories with infectious agents, live animals, recombinant DNA, etc.
- Lab Safety-Basics, Biological + Bloodborne: for laboratories with bloodborne pathogens, human cell lines, etc.
Get more information about selecting the right Lab Safety track and enrollment links you can share by email to your team at https://bit.ly/lab-tracks-info
Alternatively, you can email orrs.train@msu.edu and request the appropriate track be added to one or more of your subordinates. The Ability team will then remove any redundant course assignments.
Online Site-Specific Training Documentation
In the past, documentation for annual site-specific training was kept in the lab. This is changing. Your lab personnel will soon notice Lab Site-Specific training is listed in the Ability training system in their Requirements.
Personnel can now upload documentation of their site-specific training activity directly into the Ability compliance training system. Hard copies stored from past training are sufficient for now. Though not required, labs are encouraged to upload any new site-specific training documentation into the online Ability course. This will avoid a rush of expiring site-specific notifications next fall. By September 2023, EHS will require all lab personnel have current site-specific training recorded in the Ability compliance training system.
You can prepare for this change in several ways.
- Note or bookmark the Site-Specific training FAQ page - https://bit.ly/FAQ-SSTC.
- Access the Site-Specific Training course yourself to launch, save, and upload the file to create a completion record. (Your lab can start uploading its own checklist instead of the default form as long as it includes all the PI, location, and date of the training was provided.)
- As personnel require lab-specific training this year, ensure they begin using the new process.
More Assistance
- About the process to start using Lab Safety Tracks and the online documentation of site-specific training, reply to ORRS.TRAIN@msu.edu.
- For specific lab safety questions contact EHS@msu.edu.