Construction and practice of the “three-in-one” laboratory safety culture ecosystem

Although universities place growing emphasis on safety, safety incidents continue to happen from time to time, making it an enduring issue that demands ongoing monitoring and enhancement. On the one hand, teachers and students lack subjective initiative in safety work, often regarding safety regulations as an externally imposed burden rather than an internal need. On the other hand, common problems in daily management include the gradual weakening of responsibility transmission along the chain, superficial implementation of regulations, and gaps in the development of students' safety behaviors. The root cause underlying these phenomena is that universities have yet to build a cultural ecosystem that integrates responsibility, regulations, people, and environment; without the influence of culture, even the most detailed regulations may amount to empty talk.

To address this problem, Northeast Forestry University has systematically explored and innovatively constructed a “three-in-one” laboratory safety culture ecosystem, built on three pillars: safety responsibility as the foundation, safety guarantee as the support, and safety culture as the guide. The core logic of this system is to attach the “soul” of safety culture to the “body” of safety management; through the organic integration of responsibility enforcement, condition support, and cultural guidance, it creates an intrinsically safe educational environment. In practice, this ecosystem is implemented across three levels. First, at the institutional level, the university has built a comprehensive and clearly structured “institutional jungle” and established a sound supervision and accountability mechanism to ensure that every safety task follows clear rules and evidence. Second, in terms of hardware support, the university has introduced advanced physical and technical protection measures, implemented full-process digital management of hazardous chemicals, and created a full-coverage, three-dimensional safety protection network integrating environmental monitoring, intelligent early warning, and emergency response and providing solid support for the implementation of safety work. Third, at the level of cultural guidance, the university adopts systematic safety education and intensive training, building an integrated safety education system that combines classroom teaching, practical training, and virtual simulation, and setting role models in laboratory safety management to provide soft guidance. This approach stimulates teachers' and students' sense of safety identification, gradually creating a laboratory cultural atmosphere in which “everyone speaks of safety and acts for safety.” This allows the safety culture to genuinely take hold in the hearts and minds of all members.

Through the continuous implementation of a series of safety culture measures with a distinctive “Northeast Forestry University identity,” the university effectively cultivates a conscious safety awareness among teachers and students, driving a fundamental transformation of the safety management model from “passive constraint” to “active internalization” as the seed of safety takes root and grows in the hearts of all members of the university community. Ultimately, the effectiveness of laboratory safety governance is considerably improved, laying a solid foundation for cultivating innovative talent with a high level of safety literacy and providing a replicable, scalable practical model for building a robust campus safety defense line and advancing the modernization of university laboratory safety governance.