Tailor-Built and Thoroughly Trained: Emergency Preparedness using the BioWOPER Methodology from Sabai
Introduction
As routine handlers of highly dangerous biological materials and processes, laboratories throughout the biopharmaceutical manufacturing industry are required to possess strict emergency response protocols which dictate how research staff should respond to a given biological materials emergency.
However, if you’ve ever executed your emergency response plan or practiced it step by step, how did it go?
Most likely, you found it difficult to implement in the conditions of a real-time emergency scenario. Maybe your staff had difficulty following the procedures. Perhaps the response plan simply doesn’t fit your facility’s specific needs and might even put your staff at serious risk of harm in the event of a real emergency.
At Sabai, we see this time and time again at our clients’ facilities: “cookie-cutter” emergency response plans consistently fail at anticipating natural human responses to emergency situations and are misrepresentative of a facility’s unique layout, circumstances which exposes and endangers research personnel.
But what if there was a better way of preparing your facility for an emergency, one that would equip your staff to deliver an optimized response to a biological emergency and safeguard their wellbeing?
With Sabai’s BioWOPER™, there is.
BioWOPER is our unique biosafety planning and training methodology used to create, train, and implement a custom-built, large-scale biological emergency response for your facility. Closely collaborative, BioWOPER utilizes Sabai’s unmatched biosafety expertise1 to conduct an intimate consultation of your facility layout. These consultations produce high-quality data used to generate a highly customized, tailored emergency response plan and materials. Finally, our BioWOPER experts thoroughly train your staff’s knowledge and ability to carry out the optimized emergency response plan.
Sabai’s BioWOPER: Customized Safety in Action
While biopharmaceutical manufacturing facilities possess some form of a response plan, the mere existence of a response plan does not equate preparedness. And, of course, a large-scale biological emergency is by definition unpredictable. That’s why it’s of utmost importance to equip your research staff with deeply embedded knowledge (and practice!) of your plan, its specific procedures and requisite materials.
And the reality is that human error must be a deeply embedded factor in any emergency response plan.
In most cases, cookie-cutter response plans fail to anticipate the natural human response to any emergency: which is to react instinctively rather than logically. Lax biosafety oversight in laboratories throughout the United States have led to highly dangerous lab leaks; such was the case last year at the University of Madison-Wisconsin, where the accidental release of a lab-created H5N1 viruses occurred, threatening a worldwide pandemic.
The need to contain such dangerous occurrences should be clear by now.
Biopharmaceutical manufacturers need an emergency response plan expertly tailored to their facility’s unique operations, layout, and personnel. But their needs don’t end there. In addition to customized emergency response procedures they need thorough, effective and practical staff training to empower personnel—increasing the likelihood that such procedures are actually carried out at the critical moment.
That’s where Sabai steps in.
Customizing Safety: How BioWOPER™ Optimizes Biological Emergency Preparedness
With BioWOPER, our biosafety experts assess your facility’s biological emergency response plan to build a customized iteration based on an intimate knowledge of your facility, personnel and operations. Then, we train your personnel to achieve a comprehensive understanding and adherence to your updated protocols.
We conduct a walkthrough of your facility to closely analyze foot traffic patterns, identify cleanroom stages, evacuation routes, donning/doffing procedures, and PPE. Our team also locates and examines your facility’s exits, hot and cold zones, muster points, and the relevant phone numbers personnel will need to contact at the onset of a biosafety emergency. BioWOPER’s careful, yet thorough examinations produce the data necessary to issue the right adjustments to and subsequent training on your optimized emergency response plan.
Close collaboration with your personnel is perhaps the most important component to BioWOPER, resulting in the transmission of practical and creative emergency response solutions that would be initiated in an emergency due to your staff’s intimate knowledge of response protocol through such rigorous training.
Achieving Optimized Emergency Preparedness with The Sabai Team
At Sabai, we prioritize building relationships with real people in our field. Rather than assigning a single consultant, our clients benefit from a core team of experts who assess existing protocols and guide the development of tailored response plans. Designed to meet your specific needs and logistics, BioWOPER instills confidence in your emergency preparedness by enabling detailed feedback and customized training programs that ensure effective implementation.
At Sabai, our roots originate from biosafety expertise. And today we remain passionately committed to protecting research staff while they focus on life-altering, lifesaving work.
We’d love to talk about how BioWOPER™ can optimize your biological emergency planning.
Reach out to the Sabai team today.
The idea and focus of BioWOPER was conceived jointly by team members from Sanofi and Sabai.
