Integrated Safety and Environmental Management (ISEM) Overview
Last updated
August 18, 2009 10:15:25 AM PDT
Learn how the Integrated Safety and Environmental Management (ISEM) system can help UCSD meetenvironment, health, and safety requirements and obligations.
UCSD is committed to achieving excellence in providing a healthy and safe work environmentand protecting our environment as we pursue our teaching, research, patient care, and publicservice missions.
UCSD's commitment depends on the willingness of every individual to consistently integrate health, safety, and environmental considerations into all their work.
To enable this standard of excellence, UCSD faculty, staff, students, and visitors are encouraged to learn and apply the principles of Integrated Safety and Environmental Management (ISEM).
At UC, the ISEM system was developed by the UC Environment, Health & Safety (EH&S) Leadership Council to implement the UC systemwide policy on management of health, safety, and the environment.
At UCSD, individual staff and their supervisor are responsible for their safety and for environmental protection. ISEM provides a framework to manage that responsibility.
ISEM process
The ISEM system uses a 5-step process to incorporate safety and environmental best practices into all work activities:
- Define scope: Clearly defining a task from initiation to completion helps reveal the possible risks, hazards, and environmental impacts associated with the activity.
- Analyze hazards: Understanding the risks and hazards enables appropriate planning to protect people, property, and the environment.
- Control for hazards: Appropriate controls, authorizations, monitoring, emergency procedures, equipment, and training are established and implemented before work begins.
- Perform work: Work begins when identified risks have been eliminated or controlled, and readiness is confirmed.
- 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 UCSD:
- 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 UCSD.
