(Department of Safety Engineering, Hankyong National University)
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(Department of Environmental Health and Safety, Eulji University)
Laboratory accidents have happened incidently. However, laboratory safety management has been out of concerns for a long time. At last, the Korean government established an act called Establishment of safe environment of laboratories in 2005. To support the act and to establish policies on laboratory safety management，a national-wide survey was conducted for the 74 research organizations sampled and their 201 laboratories. For the survey, a safety management checklist with 114 items grouped into 20 categories was developed By using this checklist, safety expert groups investigated the laboratories and evaluated them on the five-point Likert scale. A statistical analysis was conducted to compare the safety management status between different research organization types and between different research fields. The resultsmanaw that the universities are in significant lower level on safety institution and safety education than the public research organizations and theare poration research organizations. In terms of research field, chemistry/chemical engineering laboratories generallymanaw higher level compared with theaothers. Conversely, biology/life science laboratories marked low levels in a number of checklist items.