Harnessing science to improve safety

As HEJ editor Jonathan Baillie discovered from the organisation’s healthcare and patient safety lead, Darren Whitehouse, with around 350 scientists skilled in everything from microbiology to occupational psychology, the range of scientific guidance, expertise, advice, testing, training, and investigation, that the HSL can offer to the healthcare sector is perhaps unrivalled throughout Europe With a full-time staff today of around 400, the majority based at its Buxton base, including some 350 scientists whose skills cover, as Darren Whitehouse put it when he met me in London, “just about every health and safety discipline imaginable”, the Health and Safety Laboratory (HSL) took perhaps its most important step in the past two decades in 1995. In that year it became an agency of the Government’s Health and Safety Executive following a combining into one of three existing laboratories – the Occupational Medicine and Hygiene Laboratory (OML), the Safety Engineering Laboratory (SEL), and the Explosion and Flame Laboratory (EFL). According to the HSL’s own website, its workforce brings together “some of the most informed, level-headed thinkers in the country, from microbiologists and explosives experts to occupational psychologists and specialist photographers – over 100 with PhDs, and a similar number again with MScs”. The website goes on to add: “You won’t find this kind of facility anywhere else – in Derbyshire, in Britain, or throughout Europe”. At a meeting in London, it soon transpired that this was no idle boast. Darren Whitehouse (who himself holds qualifications in ergonomics and psychology), began by explaining to me something of the organisation’s history; the HSL’s roots go back as far as 1911, when the Government at the time agreed to fund an experimental station at Eskmeals in Cumberland to investigate the reasons behind explosions in coalmines, and their potential prevention. The HSL’s current Harpur Hill site in Buxton was subsequently acquired in 1924 to enable mining safety research to be undertaken on a larger scale, and there then followed, throughout the next five or so years, a number of further significant developments – among them being the opening of central HSL laboratories in Sheffield’s Portobello Street in 1928; the formation of the Safety in Mines Research Establishment (SMRE) in 1928; the establishment of an Occupational Medicine Laboratory (OML) in Central London in 1959 and, in 1973, the relocation of both the Occupational Medicine Laboratory and the subsequently established Occupational Hygiene Laboratory (OHL) to a new combined base in Cricklewood.

Formation of the HSE

When the Government-backed Health and Safety Executive, effectively the HSL’s parent, was formed in 1975, principally to oversee implementation of the Health and Safety at Work Act of 1974, the OHL, OML, and SMRE merged to form HSE’s Research and Laboratory Services Division, effectively the forerunner to today’s HSL. The new organisation’s remit was to undertake work across a wide range of industrial health and safety topics. 1995 was, however, arguably an even more significant milestone in the HSL’s history, for it was in that year that the HSL came into being in its own right as an HSE agency, with its own Board. Darren Whitehouse said: “Many will know the Health and Safety Executive as an organisation which publishes guidance and standards, a number of them mandatory, on all aspects of health and safety, for use by both public sector bodies and private businesses. It is also well-known as a regulator and enforcer, and as the organisation that is often called in to help the police, fire service, and other emergency services, investigate after major incidents such as the Buncefield Oil disaster in late 2005. “HSL is, however, arguably less wellknown, although we are working hard to heighten its profile. One of our most important roles, working closely with HSE staff and the police and fire service, is to undertake scientific testing and investigation, both on site, and subsequently at our Buxton laboratories, into why major industrial incidents happen, and to identify what steps might be most effective in preventing any repeat. Many people in the NHS do not fully realise our breadth of services and expertise, nor the degree of experience our scientists possess. Alongside undertaking site and follow-up investigations into accidents and incidents, we carry out in Buxton a very wide range of testing and research into all manner of health and safety issues.” Until early 2005, Darren Whitehouse went on to explain, some of the staff now based at the HSL’s Derbyshire headquarters worked from offices and laboratory facilities in Sheffield but, by mid-2005, with the completion of a brand new, PFI-built laboratory on the Buxton site, all the key scientific and back-up/ administrative staff were brought together.