Jason Nagy, Laboratory Safety Support Coordinator at Sentara Health has a question: is your lab’s new-hire safety orientation achieving everything it’s supposed to?
At ASCP 2026, Nagy would like to share with you his tried-and-tested formula for delivering safety onboarding that is engaging, memorable, and most importantly, effective.
The following transcript has been edited for clarity.
Hello, I'm Dr. Jason Nagy and I have a question for you. When a new employee starts in your lab, what does their safety orientation look like? Is it engaging? Is it an experience that prepares them to recognize hazards, respond to emergencies, and work safely from day one? Or is it just a stack of policies, a few signatures, and a hope that they'll remember what they read?
In reality, most labs want to provide excellent safety training, but there are some real challenges. You know, new hires are coming into the labs with different levels of experience. We have multiple different generations working in the workforce right now. And to top it off, we have staffing shortages. And these are going to create pressures to get people on the bench and trained as quickly as possible.
Let's be honest, after spending eight hours in some orientation listening to HR presentations, benefit reviews, and compliance modules, that safety training can easily get lost in all the noise. And all the while, our laboratories still remain filled with potential hazards: sharps, chemicals, biological risks, and even ergonomic challenges. We expect new employees to navigate all of these safely, often only after a limited exposure during orientation.
So in this session, I'll share with you practical strategies to move your program beyond the binder, beyond simple policy review, and we're going to discuss how to identify these risks that are unique to your laboratory and how to build safety directly into training and improve retention and competency. You'll discover actionable items and ideas to make orientation more engaging, more memorable, and most importantly, more effective.
So, whether you're a laboratory manager or a lab employee, you'll leave with tools that you can use immediately to strengthen your orientation program and help prevent injuries, exposures, and potentially costly mistakes.
I hope you'll join me this November at the ASCP/CAP joint annual meeting for “Beyond the Binder.” Let's work together to create safer laboratories, one new hire at a time.
I'll see you there.
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