Safety Committee Vision Statement:
Education that embeds accurate chemical safety instruction at all educational levels.
Safety Committee Mission Statement:
To provide resources and strategies to chemical and science educators in order to prepare chemists and others to function safely while using chemicals.
The committee meets for approximately 90 minutes in conjunction with each National ACS meeting. Our spring meeting was a virtual meeting on Sunday, March 17 2024.
At the meeting, we reviewed some informational items such as the ACS DivCHED Meeting Conduct Policy, the upcoming need for new committee
members and liaisons to the Committee on Chemical Safety, Division of Chemical Health and Safety, and AACT. Committee members updated the group on various ACS Safety initiatives: the ACS Safety Office Envisioning Project (bringing together all of the offices and ACS safety committees/divisions to work on common visions/projects) and several other initiatives. An update was given on the planned Focus Group which will provide feedback and discussion on a proposed professional development workshop to be conducted at the BCCE 2024. We also discussed possible symposia that would be appropriate for upcoming ACS meetings - national and regional. Other projects including the revision of the CHED demonstrations document to use RAMP are still in process. As the meeting wrapped up members were reminded to review the webpage and consider possible social media updates.
We had an undergraduate go through the current webpage to give a review of broken links and make suggestions for possible updates to make the page more useful. Unfortunately there is not a mechanism for the committee to make updates to the current webpage. This makes it impossible to provide accurate guidance to current safety resources for our membership.
There are several issues the committee hopes to address in the near future:
- updates of division and ACS education safety policies to reflect the inclusion of RAMP principles
- continued work on the professional development workshop with the goal of giving the first presentation in the spring of 2025
- development of an assessment plan for the workshop
- creation of a network of division members interested in safety discussions - with the aid of the ACS Office of Safety Programs
- review of safety statement requirements in J Chem Ed and other ACS texts and journals
- preparation of new page(s) for the committee website
The committee welcomes any additional suggestions for items that need to be addressed by our committee membership
Of great value to the committee are the cross-connections that several of our committee members have to the Committee on Chemical Safety (CCS) and to Division of Chemical Health And Safety (DivCHAS). We are also indebted to Marta Gmurczyk and Rachel Bocwinski of the ACS Office of Safety Programs who helps make connections with and provide information about various ACS safety-focused projects. We are working to formalize
relationships with appropriate subcommittees of the Committee on Chemical Safety and the Division of Chemical Health and Safety.