Worksheets and other materials to help labs work more safely
Most people are unaware that the Department of Health, Safety, and Environment has both safety policies and safety guidance documents. The guidance documents provide more detailed technical information than the policies, and despite the name, compliance is mandatory.
Important guidance documents include: G07, on chemical use in labs; G09, on laser pointers; and G11, the escalation protocol for unaddressed safety violations.
Safety Data Sheets, or “SDSs” are documents that summarize relevant safety information on a chemical. The old name, “Material Safety Data Sheet” is obsolete.
JHU uses a commercial SDS database called ChemWatch. See GOLDFFX Guide for detailed instructions on how to use ChemWatch.
The database contains hundreds of thousands of vendor/manufacturer SDSs, updated frequently, plus many “Gold” SDSs written by ChemWatch toxicologists. You should review both any manufacturer SDSs as well as the Gold SDS for the chemical you are using.
If ChemWatch does not have the SDS you need, contact the Department of Health, Safety, and Environment to request a SDS. If you are not provided with a SDS upon request to your supervisor, by law you do not have to (and should not) work with that chemical.
You must access ChemWatch from a JHU IP address. If you receive a login prompt, do not try to login with your JHED ID. Connect to the campus virtual private network (VPN) using Junos Pulse and retry.
Welcome to the new JHU Laboratory Safety website. All of us in health & safety hope that it is a useful resource for you, helping you find information you need when you need it.
This site runs on WordPress, and we expect that it will be far easier to update than the old static site. Constructive comments can be sent to Dan Kuespert, Lab Safety Advocate.
All JHU affiliates are responsible, as a condition of their affiliation, to follow all established safety policies.
JHU safety policies are not hosted directly at a Homewood URL; Hopkins uses a unified system Hopkins Policies Online (HPO), to store all relevant policies.
Use https://hpo.johnshopkins.edu/hse/ as a quick way to find JHU safety policies.
Note that JHU and JHMI share a common set of safety policies–the Johns Hopkins Joint Committee on Health, Safety, and Environment makes them. Several policies, though, are hospital-specific or have sections that are healthcare-only, so read carefully.