Incident Reporting
Maintaining a safe work environment is the responsibility of everyone involved. If you witness or experience a safety concern or hazard, you are encouraged to share what you observed & learned. Reporting lab accidents and near-accidents can allow others to learn what measures need to be taken to safely run an experiment to prevent a similar situation. Information reported can be used to generate alerts, create safety moments, and stop unsafe situations.
Learning Experience Reports (LERs)
A Learning Experience Report is a document for recording incidents or situations that could have led to incidents (near-misses) that happen in a laboratory setting in a format that can allow others to learn from the experience. These files will be anonymous with a brief description of the incident and the measures that were taken to solve the problem.
Click here to see a listing of submitted LERs
Click here to submit a Learning Experience Report Form (Secure)
Reporting safety concerns
If you are not comfortable discussing a concern with your PI, group, safety officer or department but would like the University to consider investigating it, you can share your concerns through Ureport or by reporting your concerns to the office of University Health and Safety directly.
UReport is an anonymous way to report activities that may be violations of the University's policies or other laws, rules and regulations.
If you come across a systemic safety concern or hazard that could potentially affect large portions of the University, you may contact the Occupational Health division of the office of University Health and Safety (UHS-OH), which will review the details of your reported situation.
*Please note that the latter method is not anonymous, as the methods of contacting UHS-OH include speaking to representatives in person, over the phone, through email, or by faxing the report.
Serious lab incidents, Accidents
Serious incidents are injuries, fires, explosions or chemical spills & exposures that require external assistance in the form of medical evaluation, fire department, or a chemical spill response team.
All serious incidents should be reviewed as a group with your safety officer & DEHS. This investigation needs to take place soon after the incident and documentation of the discussion needs to be kept in laboratory records. The Accident Investigation form is used as an outline for discussion and a template for documentation.
Medical Evaluation for lab Injuries (suspected chemical exposures, cuts, burns etc)
Your personal health insurance will NOT cover medical expenses that occurred as a result of a work injury. The University will. This is why it is important to complete these forms in the event of personal injury that occurs while at the U.
Injury to a paid employee is reported differently than an unpaid researcher. See below for instructions related an injured paid employee vs injured unpaid individual.
PAID EMPLOYEES (professors, graduate students, post-docs, visiting researchers)- Injury to paid employees is handled as a workers compensation claim (even if no time is missed).
See UMN Policy Reporting and Managing a Workers Compensation Claim
The injured employee's supervisor will need to fill out BOTH:
the online First Report of Injury form, and
the Supervisor Incident Investigation Report form and email (211@sedgwickcms.com) or fax (952-826-3785) it to the Claims Administrator.
Important Note: If you do NOT receive an email after submitting the online first report of injury the form did not go through. Please contact the Office of Risk Management for assistance.
UNPAID students, guests & visitors
The form Bodily Injury/Property Damage Incident Report should be emailed or faxed to the University's Office of Risk Management.