Animal Facility Oversight Renner, Michael 13 Mar 2001 16:57 EST
Dear Colleagues: I'm writing in search of informational support. One of my tasks is oversight of the campus animal laboratories, and we have an emergency response problem that I'm trying to solve. At present, if an after-hours emergency occurs in the labs, only public safety has the authority to summon maintenance. Our campus police, like many, have a turnover problem because of low pay, which means that the after-hours officers typically have little experience, and so are given rigid procedures to follow for various eventualities. It doesn't matter if somebody with expertise shows up, the police decide what steps are and aren't taken to remedy the problem. This completely ties the hands of the lab personnel, and could -- has, in fact, before my tenure in this office -- result in harm or death to lab animals. For example, in one case a little over a year ago, a heater thermostat went out, locking the heater "on." I was called at home, and arrived to find that a rat colony was at 95 degrees F and climbing fast. The animals were clearly heat-stressed, but it was near zero outside, so the options for moving them were limited. I was told that maintenance had been paged but had not responded. I instructed the officer on duty to go to the next step in the procedure, paging a maintenance supervisor at home; he refused, on the grounds that the required 20 minutes to wait without a response hadn't yet passed. (Never mind that he hadn't recorded the time of the original page.) In short, the system response didn't make sense, as somebody with no expertise was controlling the responses, and all he had the authority to do was follow a predetermined checklist. {I was able to moderate the temperature through a series of Rube Goldberg contraptions, which sort of worked until technicians finally arrived over an hour after I did, we didn't lose all the rats, but several pregnant rats aborted litters, disrupting a few projects.} This setup clearly violates the spirit of the animal care guidelines, in that the laboratory personnel who are responsible for the well-being of the laboratory animals do not have the requisite authority to instigate corrective action when needed. I am convinced it puts us out of compliance with the letter of the animal care guidelines as well; I think I can change our system for the better if I can identify the specific rules that this breaks. In my real job as a professor, I've done animal research for a long time, which means that my understanding of the regulations is now intuitive and I don't know my way around the books as well as I should in this job. Can anybody point me to the right rules? Thanks in advance for your help and any advice you can offer. Michael Renner ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Michael J. Renner, Ph.D. Interim Associate Vice President, Academic Affairs Professor of Psychology West Chester University West Chester, PA 19383 xxxxxx@wcupa.edu Telephone: 610-436-3310 Fax: 610-436-2763 http://www.wcupa.edu/_facstaff/facdev/ "The path of least resistance is always downhill." ----------------------------------------------------------------------- ====================================================================== Instructions on how to use the RESADM-L Mailing List, including subscription information and a web-searchable archive, are available via our web site at http://www.hrinet.org (click on "Listserv Lists") ======================================================================