Biosafety Emergency Response Built for Your Processes and People: Sabai’s BioWOPER™
Overview
In stressful situations, it’s human nature to react instinctively rather than respond logically—to run towards or away from a developing emergency. Yet, laboratories throughout the biopharmaceutical manufacturing industry possess strict emergency response protocols that dictate how research staff should respond to a biological materials emergency.
Here at Sabai, our consulting team has worked with many clients who report a general unease and overall dissatisfaction both with their emergency response protocols and the level of preparedness to follow them.
Real-life example: during the restructuring of one of our clients’ emergency response protocols, a member of their staff mentioned their intent to enter the containment laboratory in an emergency scenario. However well-intentioned, this was a critical misunderstanding of appropriate protocol and would have jeopardized multiple lives.
Sometimes the correct action is to address the situation; in another instance the right action is to evacuate immediately. And any deviation from these protocols can gravely endanger personnel safety.
An effective emergency response plan impacts biosafety, as well as the manufacturer’s own productivity and long-term viability. But a plan that won’t be followed in an emergency is no plan at all.
Effective emergency response requires thoughtfully tailored solutions
When an organization’s emergency response plan is poorly built, poorly explained/trained, or both, the negative effect can be insidious. Why are run-of-the-mill emergency response plans detrimental to your operations?
- They’re less likely to be followed. Boilerplate emergency planning ignores the nuances of your facility, processes, and people. A plan that isn’t adapted to your facility and your personnel is vulnerable to being abandoned.
- They’re often insufficient. In a real-life scenario, the gaps within cookie-cutter emergency response protocols leave your personnel and operations at risk.
- They erode staff confidence. Faced with a pre-fabricated response plan, your staff can often spot the holes. And they won’t trust it.
Biopharma manufacturers need an emergency response plan precisely tailored to their unique operations, facility layouts and specific personnel. In addition to well-crafted, strategically customized emergency response procedures, they need practical and effective staff training to ensure such procedures are carried out.
By building an emergency response plan and its training materials from the ground up, manufacturers vastly improve the safety of their people and their processes while optimizing overall emergency response protocol and preparedness.
BioWOPER from Sabai: Optimized Emergency Response
How might biopharmaceutical manufacturers move beyond standard-issue emergency response plans and training materials to engage personnel towards proper response protocol?
With that question in mind, we at Sabai drew on our unrivaled biosafety expertise1 to develop BioWOPER, a biosafety planning and training methodology to create, train and implement custom-built, large-scale biological emergency response.
With BioWOPER, we assess your organization’s biological emergency response plan in order to:
- Build a customized iteration that functions off an intimate knowledge of your facility, personnel and operations.
- Train your personnel toward comprehensive understanding and adherence.
Our BioWOPER team conducts a walkthrough of your facility to closely analyze foot traffic patterns, cleanroom stages, evacuation routes, donning/doffing procedures and PPE. Our team also examines associated exits, hot and cold zones, muster point location and the phone numbers personnel need at the onset of a biosafety emergency.
These careful, yet thorough examinations produce the data needed to issue the necessary adjustments to and subsequent training on your optimized emergency response plan.
Case Study Summaries: Sabai’s BioWOPER Approach in Action
- BioWOPER is a key part of our approach—helping to establish simple, creative prevention methods that are easy to implement and remember.
Sometimes, the best applications of BioWOPER are as simple as making sure there are well-stocked and routinely assessed spill kits in the right locations of your facility; that staff have everything they need—including brand new PPE boots, and respirators, for example—to clean up the maximum spill volume. In these cases, BioWOPER ensures your biological response materials are built to your needs and are not merely run-of-the-mill resources to be overlooked
- Inherent to BioWOPER is a deep dive into your biological emergency response program, allowing the opportunity to identify weak links—from your facility’s emergency infrastructure to the quality of your training manuals.
Working closely and directly with a client’s personnel is essential to discovering and mitigating such nuanced emergency response vulnerabilities like these, vastly improving personnel safety and strengthening an organization’s overall emergency preparedness, confidence and most importantly, response behavior.
Optimizing Your Emergency Preparedness: A People-First Approach
At Sabai, engaged collaboration with real humans is the foundation of everything we do. When you partner with Sabai Consulting, we don’t just assign a lone consultant to single-source your emergency preparedness. Instead, our clients receive guidance every step of the way from a core team of experts, each deeply experienced and able to scrutinize different elements of your plan materials—testing for soundness throughout the entire development process.
And we always begin by assessing what’s already working within your response planning. Delivering detailed, informed feedback on your existing emergency preparedness protocols puts our clients at ease, just as developing a customized and practical biological emergency response plan drives confidence. Finally, we work together to design efficient, engaging training that builds trust with your personnel, facilitates understanding and ensures the integrity of your procedures.
Optimal emergency response demands deliberately designed protocols built for your specific needs and logistics and effective training to carry them out. Facilitating a passionate, people-first approach to optimizing your emergency preparedness—that’s the Sabai experience.
Reach out today to learn more about BioWOPER and how together we can optimize your organization’s biological emergency planning.
The idea and focus of the BioWOPER™ training platform was conceived jointly by team members from Sanofi and Sabai.
