Safety

Reporting, Disclosing, And Using Your Team Agreement

Teams are required by the Faculty to extensively train their members to act in accordance with UBC Safety Policy SC1. In addition, practising safety is paramount to professional development. EGBC, for example, puts holding paramount “the safety, health and welfare of the public, the protection of the environment and promote health and safety within the workplace” as the number one policy in their Code of Ethics.

Each member must pass the safety training requirements for their workspace in order to obtain workspace access. Violation of Safety Requirements will result in the member’s FOB access being revoked and may result in the team being placed on probation. The Faculty reserves the right to restrict access to resources until safety guidelines are followed.

Safety Plans

Student Teams are expected to develop comprehensive safety plans, outlining the relevant actions that need to be taken to ensure safe operation in their space and while working on their project. Safety plans reduce the likelihood of accidents occurring by improving team awareness, and help improve how teams deal with emergencies by ensuring that things have been thought through ahead of time. A sample Safety Plan form can be found in the page below.

Existing Procedures & Templates

Hazardous Materials – Safety and Disposal

Many teams require the use of hazardous materials, such as resins and combustibles, in their projects. Teams must take all necessary safety precautions when handling these materials. Teams should be aware of the appropriate PPE required, and should keep up to date Safety Data Sheets in their space. Hazardous materials cannot simply be flushed down a drain or thrown in a trash can. The APSC Safety and Facilities Officer has an account with UBC Waste Management and can help teams dispose of any hazardous materials. Contact Richard Colwell at richard.colwell@ubc.ca or Ailish Statham at ailish.statham@ubc.ca for more information on the disposal process. More information can be found in the EDT Safety Training Course.

Incidents and First Aid

All UBC Campus Security personnel are trained First Aid Attendants: in the event that first aid is needed, call 250-807-8111. If it is a medical emergency, call 911, then 250-807-8111 as UBC Campus Security can respond and be on-scene faster.

Incident Reports

Team Members must inform their Safety Officer, as well as the Safety and Facilities Officer ASAP in the event of an incident or a near-incident. You should also notify your faculty advisor(s). It is required that your team’s Safety Officer fill out an Online Incident Account form on the UBC Centralized Incident / Accident Reporting System (CAIRS). This form provides UBC with the information it requires to identify potential lapses in safety and areas for improvement, as well as ensuring that the appropriate steps have been taken to remediate the incident. You will be required to login with your CWL credentials to access the form.

Liability Insurance

Student teams are often required to carry Liability Insurance in order to compete in events or test their projects in certain facilities. UBC may provide student teams with Liability Insurance. To request a certificate of insurance for your team, plan in advance a minimum of 2 weeks lead time. Contact the Engineering Design Team Coordinator (team.engineering@ubc.ca) with information including: the facility requesting the certificate of insurance, any specific terms that are required, and the dates which the facility will be used.

Student Team Safety Funding

If your team incurs a cost that you believe is safety-related, contact Richard Colwell or Ailish Statham (below) to see if reimbursement is possible. The amount of reimbursement will vary year-by-year.

Contact Information

If you have any further questions or concerns after reading the previous section and taking the online safety course, please contact the APSC Safety and Facilities Officer.

Richard Colwell
Safety and Facilities Officer, Faculty of Applied Sciences
The University of British Columbia | Vancouver Campus
Wayne and William White Engineering Design Centre
Room 235, 2345 East Mall | Vancouver, BC V6T 1Z4
Phone: 604-822-2273 | Cell: 604-786-8008
richard.colwell@ubc.ca

Teams often collect personal information as part of their recruitment and financial operation. It is important that teams abide by the relevant privacy standards as groups hosted within a public Canadian institution.

The following information has been sourced from the University Counsel Privacy Fact Sheet.

Many computing services are offered through the Internet, and may be hosted in the United States or other foreign jurisdictions. Using these services to collect, store, transmit or access personal information is a violation of the restrictions against storage or access outside Canada.

Here are some examples of commonly used cloud services, with Canadian-based alternatives:

Student Teams that use non-Canadian services to host private information, including Student Emails and Student Numbers, are required to acquire student consent before doing so.

Consent

It is acceptable to store or access an individual’s personal information outside Canada if you have the consent of the individual. This consent must be in writing and must specify:

• who may store or access the personal information;
• if practicable, the jurisdiction in which the personal information may be stored or from which the personal information may be accessed; and
• the purpose of the storage of or access to the personal information.

Since it may not be practical to secure written consent from every student, it is acceptable for teams to secure the consent as follows:

• in the team documents, or in a written communication to the students, describe the cloud-based service and the information that it will be storing or accessing, and explain that if the students choose not to provide their consent to this storage or access, they must see the team lead to make alternate arrangements; and
• make alternate arrangements for students who refuse to provide their consent, such as allowing them to sign in to the service using a false name and non-identifying email address.

Teams should note that the restriction on storing personal information on outside servers also applies to sponsors. “Personal information” is defined as “recorded information about an identifiable individual.” Work contact information is not considered personal information. However, student teams should still consider this information “sensitive,” because it is not always publicly posted and it is important to consider whether or not the individual would want their information made public (i.e. through a Freedom of Information request). Financial information, including sponsorship amounts, should also be considered sensitive.

Workspace 2.0 has been decommissioned. It was formerly a service alternative to Dropbox which has been discontinued after the full deployment of SharePoint and Teams for all UBC staff and students. Microsoft Teams is the recommended Canadian file-storage system. UBC provides 25.6 TB of storage through Teams to all teams who have a UBC-authorized workspace.

Additionally, teams are encouraged to use their official UBC FASmail as their team’s email accounts, rather than using Gmail or Hotmail. For more information and how to sign up, visit UBC IT.

For team-related merchandise, visit UBC Brand as a guide for your designs that involve any UBC branding. This includes your team’s logo, the usage of the UBC Crest, and so on.

Each engineering design team is recommended to have a Safety Officer. 

Role & Responsibilities

• Creation of Safe Work Procedures (SWPs) for each task/operation undertaken by the Engineering Design Team
• Monitor and/or train new members on said procedures
• Report incidents/accidents to APSC Safety Officer and submit a report to the UBC CAIRS system
• Contact APSC Safety Officer on any safety, security, or facility questions

Safety Officer Resources

• Incident Reporting

Documents & Templates

Templates

• EDT Safety Plan
• UBC Safe Work Procedure (SWP)

Checklists

• Workplace Safety Orientation
• General Work Area Inspection

Signage

• Emergency & Safety Contacts
• Stay Safe

Standard Safe Work Procedures

• Working Alone
• Spill Clean Up
• CNC Router
• Welding (Formula)