Instruction in process safety began at the Faculty of Chemical Technology, University of Pardubice, in the nineties. In 1994, a course named the Safety Engineering was formed. We aimed to equip our students with a theory that would orientate them in safety problems during their professional lives. Similar to analogous courses at other universities, the Safety Engineering course tends to follow basic steps of the quantitative risk analysis (QRA). An accident analysis and two basic notions—a system and a hazard—were selected as starting points of the course. But after a few years of experience we felt that the Safety Engineering course did not represent exactly what the majority of our students needed. Although the concept of risk analysis represents a fundamental part of any process safety theory, there is another concept that seems to be essential for professionals involved in the process industry—safety management. We started to recognize that an introduction into comprehensive process safety education should be divided into two stages. The safety management and the risk analysis should represent focal points of the first and the second stages, respectively. Two stage arrangement of the process safety course seems to suit needs of our students better than the previous scheme. After the idea of division of the process safety course had arisen, a new starting point for the comprehensive safety education had to be found. An old approach of Kletz's on “learning from accidents” showed itself to be suitable to fulfill this role most naturally. © 2007 American Institute of Chemical Engineers Process Saf Prog 26:195–202, 2007

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Most of the available risk management methods are not directly applicable to academic research laboratories. One solution to systematically perform risk analyses in this environment is the Laboratory Assessment and Risk Analysis (LARA) method. This method was developed to allow untrained personnel to identify of possible risks and rank them according to their importance. The purpose of this study was to find out, if this method can be used as a holistic risk management technique in different environments, and which are the differences when comparing the results to other, well established risk analysis techniques. The risk analyses were performed at two European universities and for various procedures. The results show, that the LARA procedure is more easily performable than the other methods and gives comparably adequate results. Being applicable by non-experts, this holistic risk analysis method for research laboratories can help to reduce the accident rate in the academic environment.

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