At-Risk Behaviour Analysis and Improvement Study in Chemical Engineering Laboratories

Students working in chemical engineering laboratories are usually exposed to hazardous materials and unsafe environment. Injuries, accidents or even fatalities were often reported due to students violated safety practices while working in the laboratory. There was no reported systematic programme that can be used in laboratory setting to avoid and reduce the resulting injuries, accidents, or fatalities due to students’ at-risk behaviours. Thus, there is certainly a need to develop a programme that systematically control the students’ behaviours and eliminate or reduce the accidents in the laboratory. A behavioural safety programme is available for industrial setting known as Behaviour Based Safety (BBS) that successfully control at-risk behaviours of the workers and reduce the injury rate. However, BBS is very labour intensive and many organizations did not obtain and sustain comprehensive participation in BBS related activities. To overcome these limitations, Online At-Risk Behaviour and Improvement System (e-ARBAIS) was recently introduced as an alternative to BBS. This paper presents a study that used a modified e-ARBAIS methodology to identify and improve students’ at-risk behaviours in chemical engineering laboratory. The methodology is named as Lab-ARBAIS maintains the original e-ARBAIS concept by using computer technology for data acquisition and analysis of at-risk behaviours observed. The analyzed observation feedback was posted in students’ e-Learning portal to allow the students to view and judge their safety practices in the laboratory. The Lab-ARBAIS programme was implemented in chemical engineering laboratories at Universiti Teknologi PETRONAS for undergraduate class as a case study. The Lab-ARBAIS programme had received positive students’ participation and gave significant improvements on frequent violated safety practices by students.