Skip to main content

System Status: 

Integrated Safety and Environmental Management (ISEM) Overview

Learn how the ISEM process can help UC San Diego achieve environment, health, and safety objectives.

UC San Diego is committed to providing a healthy and safe workplace and protecting the environment as we pursue our teaching, research, patient care, and public service missions.

This commitment depends on the willingness of every individual to consistently integrate health, safety, and environmental considerations into our work.

About ISEM

ISEM is a 5-step planning, performance, and review process for incorporating safety and environmental best practices into work activities:

  1. Define scope: Clearly defining a task from initiation to completion helps reveal the possible risks, hazards, and environmental impacts of the activity.
  2. Analyze hazards: Understanding the risks and hazards enables appropriate planning to protect people, property, and the environment.
  3. Control for hazards: Appropriate controls, authorizations, monitoring, emergency procedures, equipment, and training are established and implemented before work begins.
  4. Perform work: Work begins when identified risks have been eliminated or controlled, and readiness is confirmed.
  5. Evaluate performance: How can we do better next time? From the planning stage to wrap up, gather feedback, review monitoring results, and look for ways to improve the process.

Core principles

ISEM relies on weaving these core principles into the way we do business at UC San Diego:

  • Line management responsibility – All employees are responsible for integrating safety, health, and environmental standards into their work and for ensuring active communication up and down the management line and with others.
  • Clear roles and responsibilities – Establish and communicate roles and responsibilities to ensure safety, health, and environmental standards are considered in all aspects of campus activities.
  • Competence commensurate with responsibilities – Ensure every individual has the knowledge, skills, experience, and abilities to carry out their responsibilities.
  • Balanced priorities – Make protecting people and the environment a priority whenever university activities are planned and performed.
  • Identification of safety standards and requirements – Evaluate associated hazards before an activity is performed. Communicate appropriate standards and requirements to everyone involved or impacted by the activity.
  • Hazard controls tailored to work performed – Implement administrative and engineering controls to prevent and mitigate hazards specific to the work being performed and associated hazards.
  • Operations authorized – Clearly establish and agree upon the conditions and requirements to be satisfied for any activity to be initiated and conducted at UC San Diego.

The ISEM system was developed by the UC Environment, Health & Safety (EH&S) Leadership Council to implement the UC systemwide policy on the management of health, safety, and the environment.

For more information, contact the EH&S Safety Training manager.
Note: This page has a friendly link that's easy to remember: http://blink.ucsd.edu/go/ISEM