Sheri Sangji Case Study

Megann Schmidt
Midterm Paper

The laboratory fire resulting in Sheri Sangji death was a tragic but preventable incident, and it is important to learn from this and similar incidents, ensuring they never happen again. A number of different actions could have been taken by many different individuals that could have prevented the incident altogether or at least spared Sangji’s life. There are many things Sangji herself, the other group members nearby, Professor Harran, and the university leadership could have done to prevent this incident and make the university and that specific laboratory a much safer place to work.
For starters there is a number of things that Sangji could have done herself to prevent the fire and it’s consequences. In one
For starters, he has very clearly failed to develop an environment in his laboratory where safety is a priority. This is displayed by the lack of safety training for his postdocs carrying over to a lack of safety training for Sangji. This is also displayed in the fact that he had a large number of deficiencies in the most recent safety inspection before the incident, none of which were fixed by the deadline. By not doing anything about the definciences, Harran lead his employees to believe that they were still safe despite these definecies. If he had taken action to make safety personal, he would have realized how unsafe his lab conditions were for his employees and worked hard to not only fix the issues but seek out other potential problems before they arise. For example, he would have recognized a major hazard being the fact that his employees were not properly trained when it came to safety, and fixed it by providing them with adequate trainings and supervision until they were ready. When the leader of a lab escalates safety issues so that they are taken seriously and fixed before incidents occurs, those below him are much more likely to adapt that behavior themselves. Another thing that Harrna could have done to prevent this incident is ensure Sangji was conducting experiments that she was capable of or having someone supervise her. Sangji was inexperienced in the laboratory,
Harran’s laboratory had been given a number of deficiencies in the previous safety inspection, and they were told to fix these deficiencies by December 5th. At the time of the incident on December 29th, none of these deficiencies had been fixed. The fact that there is safety inspections of the laboratory is a step in the right direction, but a safety inspection means nothing if you aren’t going to do anything when standards are not being met. In terms of the PACE model, the university is completely missing the escalate step in which something is actually done to fix an issue. Based on this information and the articles, it doesn’t appear that laboratory safety was a priority at the university, and based on statistics I’ve found it doesn’t appear that laboratory safety is much of a priority at any university. One article even said that workers in university labs are 11 times more likely to get hurt in a university lab than in an industrial lab, according to the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration statistics. Therefore, if universities leaders were to start taking safety more seriously and personally, by enforcing safety standards and educating faculty and staff about their importance then hazards like the ones that caused this incident could be recognized and handled before they turn into a tragedy. Overall, this incident could have been prevented by a